Have you ever felt that things were slipping behind your back? That the future continues to sneak around us with a speed more and more surreptitious?
It does not matter. There is too much to do. You need to visit the ATM before you go shopping and use the new self check-out at Wal-Mart. Then go to the video kiosk downtown to order your movies for next week. Do not forget to send an SMS to Bob to remind him to send Joey an email before Sunday. Fortunately, you’re giving your kids the all-new PlayStation – they’ll stay stuck in for two weeks, so you can watch all your shows without interruption.
How did all this begin? Besides the T.V, where was all this technology ten years ago?
In the field of computer technology, a law called Moore’s Law states, in simple terms, that the processing capabilities of the core computer chip have grown exponentially every eighteen months since their inception. Around 2017, this will result in hyper-intelligent machines that have a thickness of atoms.
On average, most humans in the “modern” world now devote much more time to machines than other humans, even if they may use them to reach other people. We become more and more dependent on them without even stopping to realize it. Remember Y2K? Yes, people were scared. Now, in every aspect of our lives, we need machines to work, and this continues to snowball.
Nanotechnology is only years old. The human genome has now been completely mapped, even if it is rough, providing us with the very plans of human evolution. Synthetic biology has recently emerged, offering scientists the only asset that remains to be retained: the power to create life from scratch. And for those working in the field of artificial intelligence, they are now plunged into a desperate race against Moore’s Law, to create a “friendly friend” before the time runs out. They have only one chance.
Everything will change, very soon. It’s already. Over the last decade, a radical paradigm shift has begun – in the words of futurist, inventor and author Raymond Kurzweil – “the nature of work, human learning, government, war, the arts and our concepts of ourselves. ”
Immortality is becoming a reality – quantum physics has shown us that. It will simply be, eventually, at the discretion of those who choose to go one way or another – if we come to that. There are many possible traps along the way, with cataclysmic proportions. This is, in my opinion, the most important problem we face as a species, and hardly anyone seems to know it.
There is so much at stake in all of this – there are so many different angles to take into account, arguments to consider, that it’s almost impossible to know what to stand for. But it’s real and it’s happening. Each of us needs to look at the big picture and decide how we feel about it and where we are.