In 1970 futurist Alvin Toffler wrote his famous book of the above title, which was all about what happens to people overwhelmed by technological change which takes place too quickly for them to cope. For all that, the world of 1970 now seems as technologically remote from 2011 as 1900 must have seemed in 1970 and even Toffler would probably admit it has changed beyond what he could have imagined.
Increasingly so, it seems as if everything is changing at an ever accelerating rate. The “life-long familiars” of our worlds are vanishing fast and the facets and features of our lives are now morphing into ever more sophisticated versions of themselves, evolving and merging as they simultaneously spread their technological reach out ever further, ever faster. For the first time in human history, we are observers of a technological evolution taking place at hyper-speed. We see more change in a period of 24 months than our recent ancestors would have seen in their whole lifetimes.
Where is it all headed?
The faster it moves the more difficult it becomes to predict – what’s obvious of course is that there is no foreseeable destination; it’s the long “now” that races away from us into the haze of the strange decades ahead. Watching it take place, it’s moving too fast to be controlled. Who would deny we are already on the downhill sprint to near invisible yet all powerful computing; the hardware is busy vanishing into ever smaller versions of itself yet each generation is exponentially more power and versatile than its “parent”. Soon it will disappear into the very material of our lives, under our skin, our clothes, and every device we own, out of sight yet immensely powerful and permanently awake. And when all these devices and smart programmes are interconnected and communicating 24-7, will that challenge our very concepts of sentience?
How long now before software is developed that can develop smarter versions of its self and thereby become responsible for its own destiny. Such a concept challenges our very preconceptions of our own position in the natural pecking order of “life”. In 1970 such a statement would have been ridiculous; the stuff of hard science fiction – now we can speculate about whether it might not already be happening. The fiction in science fiction is under threat.
All around us this technological revolution is taking place. It’s not that is good or bad, such terms in themselves seem naively out of place and quaintly redundant – we are cumbersome, static, biological witnesses to another form of evolution, not on the comfortable, glacial speeds of the more natural kind with which we are so familiar, but one that, in the proverbial blinking of a couple of eyes, continuously contorts and twists itself into ever more fantastic technological “miracles” that our grandparents would never have believed possible.
When is a human more than a human?
We laugh at the endless succession of z-list celebs undergoing hilariously bad makeovers. Like the weirdly plump, plaster of Paris like face of Paul McCartney who in some expressionless, pinched way now looks younger than he did in 30 years ago. Or Madonna, like some phantasmagorical nicotine blond harpy who defies time and the aging process thanks to science (and kabala). How old is she now – 40 or 60 – it’s impossible to tell. Yet these attempts to hold back the process of ageing (for millennia the dream of the powerful) represent the first crude steps in what will in pretty short order develop into real life extension technology. Life spans are already increasing (much to the distress of pension fund managers who watch their liabilities soar in parallel) and medical science will only add more years to that tally. What will lifespans be in 200 years? Would you put money on the likelihood that people might not be living for 200, 300 or even more years? The fact is, the longer you live, the longer you’ll stay alive. As Lemmy once said, the secret to long life is not dying.
Prosthetics are another area of amazing progress, no doubt accelerated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The artificial will soon easily catch up and accelerate effortlessly past the biological with its vastly superior evolutionary speeds; it will only be a short while before the paralympians are able to out-compete the purely meat Olympians – Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter is already leading the way in more ways than one. No wonder other athletes object to competing against him. They can see where this is going. Oscar can upgrade his legs.
But that is only half the story. Even today many people think of prosthetics as limbs, hands, hips and the like. Yet, they are becoming ever more sophisticated, replacing ever more human parts, and enhancing others. Silicon chips will soon start assisting the brain. Research is currently being conducted in the area of retinal microchip implantation. Elsewhere Intel researchers say that by the year 2020, you won't need a keyboard and mouse to control your computer. Instead, users will open documents and surf the web using nothing more than brain waves. You could be forgiven for wondering why it would take until 2020.
What we are seeing is that our brains are merging with our technology. Not long no doubt till, a few chips can be strategically inserted to boost specific intellectual facilities and enhance the senses. The potential is almost too vast to understand - the implications tantamount to the rise of a new and increasingly superior life form on earth. This may seem like some science fiction story – but it’s not and science is already moving in this direction as this is it this kind of enhancement to our intellectual capacities that will enable us to keep pace with the developments of what was once our own technology but which is now set to take on a new and much more equal relationship with us.
So what does that mean for the concept of a human being? Science has the potential to enable someone smarter than a biological human being. This philosophical Rubicon is almost here, now. Will we have begun to evolve into something else?
A Technological Event Horizon
It’s as if we are all headed to an invisible point beyond which we cannot imagine what will happen. In that sense we have already crossed a sort of technological “event horizon” in that such a momentum is building that it’s already too late to stop or slow down. Not that we should, although its technological and high speed, its evolution and you can as much stop and backtrack it as you can reverse engineer a sausage to get back your favourite pig.
The shock of the future is now and its voltage it starting to soar.
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