Engines of Creation #8

"I teach you the overman. Man is something that is to be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

John von Neumann (to Stanislaw Ulam)

Have you ever wondered how the world would look like in 200 years from now? Or in 500 years? Or in several millennia? Has it ever occurred to you by how much the human civilization has changed over the last hundred years? Have you noticed that even though the world changes every day and billions of people work hard to make those changes happen, no one is actually thinking to what it might eventually lead?

Sure, you may say, prolongation of human life, control over diseases, raising living standards, consume entertainment to achieve yet another level of leisure and pleasure, liberties, proliferation of ideas, free speech; a society of artists, thinkers and inventors.

And, somewhat surprisingly, there is an ultimate goal to which it all leads. A world of ageless equals, a world in which science reached singularity. A world of posthuman beings who began to consciously shape themselves as they please. And the conception phase of becoming posthuman has just begun.

Science-fiction blah blah? Drug-induced visions of a geek? Far from it.

Take a look at science of today. On an everyday basis information technology meets mathematics meets physics meets chemistry meets biology meets medicine meets psychology meets sociology meets information technology. Whatever the discipline, whatever the topic of the research, whatever the progress and ensuing appreciation from the community, the Net has become the de facto layer of the universe where results of all human activities meet. And they get tagged, bookmarked, indexed, hyperlinked, back-tracked, blogged and commented. They mix, boil and mature in the cauldron of cyberspace, more and more frequently popping up with offspring, adding up to the ever growing web. Ideas and science roaming freely, and thus I'm not hestitating to say: we are a few steps from curing all diseases and eliminating the problems of famine, poverty and unequality. We are about to meet everyone's basic needs and thus start fulfilling our dreams.

And for that we are changing ourselves.

Knowledge and skills' hierarchies required from a human being are changing right here and now. The emergence of Google, being the most sophisticated of all digital support systems, renders the history-long value of factual information stored in one's brain less and less relevant. The value lies in the intrinsic skill of navigating the waves of this new, uncharted ocean of cyberspace rather than solving large-scale complex problems on your own. When you download and set up your Google Desktop, fire up your Google Talks, Skypes and Firefoxes, you suddenly become hooked up to the ultimate repository of human knowledge and to the ultimate social network of unprecedented momentum. You might feed yourself with news, views, ideas or entertainment of your liking and do it in an instant, become a specialist in any given subject, and once you consume enough you are able to leave a mark of your existence by feeding the Net with whatever you might want to say. The universal information society is born, the universal planetary society is within reach.

This is the present. And what about the future?

The advances of modern science and the wonder of the Internet give us an opportunity to enter and unchartered and promising path of self improvement, to feed our pride on one hand and to become capable of consuming what we created on the other.

If we can cure the sick why shouldn’t we strengthen the healthy?

Why shouldn’t we hardwire our feeble minds to the net? Why shouldn’t we join forces with the artificial intelligence systems to delegate all storage, look-up and computational tasks that our 200 MHZ brains cannot endure? Why should we restrain from thinking faster, experience the world more vividly and in its entirety?

Moreover, why shouldn't we let our bodies immerse in the omnipresent nanobots who will shape our surroundings and eventually ourselves to our requirements, or simply to suit our mood?

No one will punish us for opening Pandora's box, for equipping ourselves with wings of posthuman intelligence and agelessness. Yes, we need to step carefully in modifying our brain function, our genes, and our physiology, but let us not hold back out of fear or false admiration for nature as we find it.

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants overtake the evolution. Subsequently, they will become ever more perfect, but there is only one time when they are born.

You and I are alive at this moment. Let the engines of creation work full-steam.

And let a thousand flowers bloom.

http://www.nsf.gov/crssprgm/nano/

http://www.extropy.org/

http://www.posthuman.com/

http://www.human-evolution.org/

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html?pg=5&topic=tech

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/futurebody

Tags: posthumanism transhumanism posthuman transhuman evolution nanotechnology technology future