Making the rounds at my office last week was a video clip about the exponential pace of technological change. To the accompaniment of an urgent techno-pop soundtrack, in an onimous minor key, it presents a series of factoids illustrating the implosion of accustomed time-frames, giving the viewer the impression that the acceleration of technological, social, and economic evolution is now so great that we are hurtling into an unforeseeable future faster than we can possibly hope to adapt. The tone of the video is tawdry and sensationalist, but the impression is, I think, correct.
It does indeed seem that this can’t go on for very much longer without reaching some sort of “tipping point”, some critical threshold where there is a sudden and enormous qualitative change. This, of course, is what Ray Kurzweil has argued in putting forward the idea of the technological singularity — a transformative convergence of computer science, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, communication, and information processing that will fundamentally remake human life, not least by remaking human beings themselves. This might not turn out as well as Kurzweil and others (including me) hope, however. But it seems very clear that we are heading somewhere very fast indeed.
It is hard not so see it as a bit of a race. Just as the pace of technological change is accelerating exponentially, with the promise of enormous gifts, so are the indicators that we are doing grievous damage to our only home. We have fished the oceans almost to depletion, and have so fouled the air and water with our wastes that we stand on the brink of one of the greatest extinction events in Earth’s long history. We continue to mine, rather than farm, the world’s forests. We have created continent-sized islands of floating garbage. And above all, we create more and more copies of ourselves every second — and what’s worse, as soon as these copies are made we begin, in most cases, to stuff their heads full of superstitious nonsense.
The video ends with the question “So what does it all mean?” It means, simply put, that we are rushing headlong into a future that we can neither foresee nor avoid. We like to think that the future will be what we make of it, but I think it is more that we will be what it makes of us.
2 Comments
While not an incredibly novel idea, the observation of our rapid technological growth is delicious food for thought. It is interesting to note that among all of these rises of technology, only the select few will actually make an impact on the world. The choices we make selecting our technologies now are as drastic as the technology boom itself. We’ve had the technology for jet-packs, along with a variety of alternate energy sources for a long time, yet these technological advancements haven’t been introduced to the mainstream (due to efficiency issues, investment problems or other numerous reasons), and are not changing the ways we live our lives. It will be interesting to see which make it through when we separate the wheat from the chaff.
And for the record, that song during the video is “Right Here, Right Now” by Fatboy Slim.
~Nick
Very interesting and scary indeed, and I think maybe it’s just the natural result of compiling ordinary individuals like myself who often have a hard time figuring out what we did last week, or what I may want to do next week. Given people like us and the furious pace of technology around us, I would say chances are very very good that we’re heading for disaster. Sorry to say, I’m not a believer in the proposition that one or two people out of a million is capable of redirecting the course of history from disaster to one of acceptable survival. Unless of course, that one individual was God himself.