Life and love in the future

The annual FutureFest event, which is run by innovation charity Nesta and co-curated by Scottish writer and musician Pat Kane, is in its third year and will include speakers such as electronic music pioneer Brian Eno, author Will Self, Mustafa Suleyman - one of the co-founders of Google DeepMind artificial intelligence technology - and stage designer ES Devlin, who creates visionary sets for artists such as U2, Adele and Kanye West.

A survey carried out ahead of the festival found 60% of people in the UK think that technology will improve their future wellbeing.

But more than half also said they worry it will result in people becoming more isolated and just 28% said they expect it to have a positive impact on employment levels. Overall only around a fifth said they were optimistic about the future.

Here we look at some of the issues which will be debated at the event which is exploring four themes of thrive, work, play and love.

The future of love: synthetic emotions and sexbots

Never mind the class-ridden tension and arguments of Abigail’s Party in the 1970s – the awkward moment at dinner parties of the future could be when a guest turns up with a robot lover on their arm.

The phrase ‘synthetic emotions’ might conjure up an image of the imaginary pleasure drug Soma featured in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but today it is being used to describe the love between 'real' humans and non-human ‘humans’ in robot form or avatars in virtual worlds.

One recent survey carried out by Nesta found that a quarter of young people aged 18 to 34 in the UK would happily date a robot, as long as they looked like a real-life human being.

Ghislaine Boddington, curator of the Love theme at FutureFest, said there was debate around how people will accept and cope with this concept.

She said: “There are questions around do we stay judgemental or are we going to see much more acceptance of people who love, care and have huge affection for non-human humans. It is a bit like we have with our pets today.”

Boddington said one issue would be whether sexbots – human-like sexually functioning robots – would be accepted as ‘lovers’.

“With the sexbot doll, there is a sense of 'okay so sex toys have now become digital',” she said.

“But there is much more about the emotions – can we accept if someone comes to dinner with you in a few years’ time and brings their robot partner. How do your friends deal with that round the dinner table?”

The future of dining out

Forget perusing the wine list and traditional silver service, the restaurants of the future are more likely to feature water sommeliers and customers bringing their own ingredients to be cooked.

Eating out will also become more interactive, it is predicted, with information from social media pages informing restaurants in advance about what you like to eat and if you want to mingle with other diners.

Food futurologist Dr Morgaine Gaye, curator of the Thrive theme at FutureFest, said factors which will drive the changes include rising food prices, an increasing demand to know where exactly where food is coming from as well as a desire for different experiences.

She said: “People want a real experience, they want something that money can’t buy.

“The idea of dining out seems a little bit stuffy and the sort of thing we are going to be asking for the future is how interactive can that be?

“The digital interaction will enable consumers to meet each other, know the chef better, meet people in the restaurant, understand where the food has come from or bring their own food in.

“It is a little bit more of an experience than just coming in, ordering up a menu, eating and then saying thank you very much, goodbye.”

Gaye said with alcohol consumption dropping among the under 30s, there would be more focus on water and non-alcoholic beverages infused with botanicals such as fruits and herbs, presented in wine-like bottles.

Examples are already on the market, such as the Japanese Fillico Jewelry Water, which is sold in a bottle studded with Swarovski crystals for around £150.

Gaye predicted having water sommeliers would become a big trend.

“Experts will be talking about notes of what we might now just consider to be water,” she added.

Our future ‘curated’ lives

The idea of having a nanny, cleaner or personal trainer to help with daily life tasks is nothing new.

But in the future, services for everything from teaching your children to swim or ride a bike to and virtual personal shoppers are predicted to take the idea of “home-help” to a whole new level.

Currently such pampering is only available to people like top athletes who have a dedicated fitness regime and celebrities with plenty of cash to spare.

But we can already see this new form of the economy emerging. The Hairforce, based in London, sends its so-called “Lice Assassins” into homes of wealthy parents to clear nits out of kids’ hair with its specialist “lice hoover”, costing from £32.

Gaye said the trend was already being seen in the rise of subscription boxes which deliver everything from regular supplies of food and recipes, to socks.

And she said it would particularly appeal to today’s 20 to 30-year-olds, who have been sold the idea a celebrity lifestyle is within their grasp.

She said: “They are living as celebrities within their own lives - Instagram and Facebook have enabled them to edit their public persona.

“For them, this curated life is something they all aspire to as that is the next step in this life where they don’t have to do everything for themselves.

“That is partly because they are not capable – it is the first generation where parents who have not come from privilege wanted to give their kids everything.

“It is a generation which other countries call the curling [as in the sport] generation, where everything has been swept out of the way for them.

“For them, feeling they are being curated, they have someone looking after them and taking care of the detail is perfect for them.”

What jobs will humans have?

In 2016, most daily brushes with automation come in the form of a robot voice at the end of phone trying to get through to a customer service centres, or the self-scanning machines now present in every supermarket.

But developments in technology mean around 40% of jobs in the UK workforce will be at risk of automation in the future, according to predictions – with jobs such as telephone salesperson, bank tellers, administration workers and receptionists most in danger.

Entrepreneur Ruth Amos, curator of the Work theme at FutureFest, said there had to be discussions around where humans will fit in if, for example, robots are driving all the cars on the road.

But she argued that rather than being an issue of concern, the increase in automation could help people become happier in their jobs by taking away some of the more boring tasks.

She said: “A human element is massively important to a business, but there are lots of people who are not happy with their job.

“Around 60% of people are not happy with their job - if you had a computer system and 60% of it wasn’t working you would be getting your IT guy in.

“But businesses just expect that people will not be happy in this environment - potentially there might be more options with the rise of artificial intelligence and robots.

“If you are looking at jobs that might involve going through a lot of data, for example, a robot is better at that than a human.”

She also pointed to the example of the automated online dispute resolution scheme used by marketplace eBay to resolve disagreements between traders, which now handles around 60 million cases every year.

“That is more than all of the courts in America dealt with,” she said. “So these things are happening – it is about shifting some of those long held beliefs and thoughts and recognising that with change comes opportunity.”

How women can rule in the future

The rise of robotics is predicted to particularly affect women in the workplace, who currently have many of the roles which are tipped to be wiped out by technology.

Amos said this meant it was vital to continue ongoing conversations about how to promote equality in the workplace.

She said: “At the moment less than 10% of executive directors of FTSE 100 companies in the UK are women.

“Having those conversations and looking at the way we can have more women in the workplace is important.

“We should be asking what we should be doing to make the most positive future for women in the next 10-30 years - where are we going wrong at the moment, what should we be championing, what should businesses be doing, and looking at that positive side of having women within the workplace.”

But Amos also said that technology which is also making the traditional 9-5 desk job a thing of the past could assist women in having more flexible careers. Such a change in the way a 'career' is perceived could leave men, with their traditional view of a job, trailing behind women in the future.

“We are seeing the rise of things like portfolio careers and freelance careers, where women are working out how they want to work and what works for them," she said.

“But this isn’t a topic which is just for women, lots of men benefit from this too.

“The whole debate about how we work and flexibility is a really important one to have and how we think about some of the structures in place and whether those are the right structures for the jobs and tasks we are actually doing.”

The future of sport and play

Athletes relying on improving their capabilities through a gruelling training regime and diet may soon be a thing of the past.

This weekend an entirely new form of sport will be showcased at FutureFest called 'cybathletics', which involves people with disabilities – who call themselves pilots – working with technology to create new types of competitions.

Examples could include using a robotic ‘exoskeleton’ to climb stairs, or competing in a computer games using only thoughts to control movements.

The first Cybathlon - a kind of ‘bionic Olympics' - is being held in Switzerland next month.

Scottish musician Pat Kane, curator of the Play theme and author of the book The Play Ethic, said that what people were seeing at the event was the 'very beginning' of these new technologies and the changes they will bring to human life. He added that 'in 20/30 years time' cybathletics is "going to be extraordinary because of the way that robotics and automation technology is developing.

“It could be the case that entirely new standards of running or lifting or jumping is going to be possible with these cybathletes.”

Kane said there was debate around whether the limits of human bodies should be accepted - or whether it is just as ‘human’ to push the boundaries through enhancing performances with drugs and technology.

He also said the development of gaming technologies and play could be important in the future to provide an answer to technology making many jobs obsolete.

“Maybe there will be a bigger role for things like human relationships, care and play as something that becomes the centre of our lives, rather than something we do in the margins of our lives,” he said.

“We have to talk about a society which copes with automation in a better way than simply chucking people on the scrapheap and finding them of no use.”