Living in the End Times

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Already, in the 60's, our cities were coming to resemble electrical circuits; Today we have gone beyond the television and we operate in that Global Village that Marshall McLuhan described as an 'electronic nervous system' and─in a very cyber turn of phrase─an extension of consciousness. Indeed, in the age of cloud computing, the computer is the network; "The World Wide Web is becoming one vast, programmable machine." Nicholas Carr says in a Wired Magazine Q&A.

The science-fiction of yesterday has shaped our dreams and expectations of the future. Figures like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge argue that human-machine civilization is following an exponential curve and that it is approaching an event-horizon which will consist of an intelligence explosion as the result of the creation of a super-intelligence. Vinge says in The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era:

we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

Google is very much in the business of trying to create Artificial Intelligence. Besides the specifics of how this Singularity will come about, there are questions about whom will take part in this evolution of super-humanity.

Already, there is discussion of the technology gap between rich and poor. Will advances in bio-genetics and nano technology create a technological apartheid in which those with the money to indulge themselves in such technologies become post-human, leaving the rest of us behind in biological obsolescence?

Automation promises to free humans from the toil of hard labour and mundane, repetitive tasks. Already there are factories in which automobiles are produced almost entirely without human intervention. China this year is set to become the largest user of robotics. Foxconn ─ the world's largest electronics manufacturing contractor and the maker of Apple products─aims to have 1 million robotic arms in their factories this year. Steve Wozniak of Apple believes that in the robotic future, human beings will be the pets of the machines:

"We're already creating the superior beings, I think we lost the battle to the machines long ago," he said.
"We're going to become the pets, the dogs of the house."

Is the endgame of our technological development to produce robots and computers of such sophistication that we will, finally, be made redundant? What becomes of economics if it's end is to progressively make us all unemployed? Some people believe that automation and new forms of energy will lead to the dissolution of the monetary system and capitalism with it, to be replaced by scientific management of the economy in such a way as to create a post-scarcity world in which freedom can be reconciled with technology.

 Can humanity yet rise above politics and competition to create a better world? Or will our psycho-oligarch overlords simply choose to do away with all the useless eaters? Did someone say H5N1?

Technology is patented, commercialized, designed for obsolescence and drip-fed to the masses in version numbered, disposable chunks. On Channel TED there is talk of peak oil, ocean depletion and climate disaster, even the ATM asks me to consider the environment before I print a receipt. Even if we develop a super-intelligence, is there going to be anything left?

We seem to be racing towards a zero-point where any of these scenarios could come about but I think that ultimately, we can only maintain an attitude of open mindedness and remember that apocalyptic visions and existential angst are nothing new. Human history is certainly not yet over, the future will probably prove to be something less dramatic than the extreme scenarios that play in our imaginations.

I am tired of pessimism; the human race always changes when it is in danger of death. When we start dying in the streets, we will put a stop to pollution and other atrocities. We will react out of necessity.
─ Alejandro Jodorowsky, Psychomagic