Baroness Susan Greenfield argues that new technologies and old ideologies are impacting on our minds
From the Russian Revolution to the Nazis to the Cold War to Al Quaeda, the passage of the twentieth century was dominated by the tension between self-centred consumerism on the one hand and collective fundamentalist doctrines on the other: Someone versus Anyone.
But the deluge of technologies in the last few years has introduced a third possible option: Nobody. Could the unprecedented perversion of our our time by what some might simply see as harmless gadgets really make such a big difference to the way our children and grandchildren will live their lives?
At the extreme just imagine a society in which each person no longer defines themselves as separate entities. In such a scenario information, bio- and nano-technologies will have obliterated traditional means of individual demarcation, from the familiar firewall of the physical brain and body to our notions of external reality, to third party access to our innermost body processes, to a blurring of the daily narrative of work and leisure: in short a transformation of the entire, traditional, unique life story which defines each one of us and which makes life so fulfilling.
If some of these predictions become reality, mid twenty-first century society might look, and feel, very different. Not only would people appear more similar, in terms of a uniform age but with more standardised faces and bodies, but they would be more uniform in outlook, tending to the reactive, interactive disposition characterised by the Nobody scenario.
And if so, the mentality of the future could be to have a shorter attention span, a tendency to think in terms of visual icons rather than abstract ideas, and at the same time to be less risk-averse. Future generations would thrive on hectic, fact-fielding activities but no longer be so well equipped as their predecessors to place isolated events in a context. More over their sense of personal identity might well not be so developed and they would consequently co-exist more effectively than their twentieth-century predecessors as anonymous enablers, untroubled by issues of ego and self-image.
In any event, their motivation for daily life would be more on the process, more on the feel of the momentary experience of what they were actually doing, than on the longer-term implications or the significance of those actions. In short, life would be more comfortable and more fun, but would have less meaning.
Already such possibilities are showing signs of coming to pass, even if only on a small-scale. What we buy is coming closer to what we do: we are already shifting, at least in Western Society from merely owning goods to placing increasing emphasis on services and the feelings they produce - to sensations.
So just think of this century indeed witnessing the breakdown in the Western world of the traditional compartments of life, and bringing with it a life that's relatively unchanging from one day to the next, a life lived out of the context of a sequential narrative: nothing less than the demise of a life story.
ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century is out now published by Sceptre, £16.99.