#technology age

Evolution Revolution

Danielle Knafo, Ph.D. and Rocco Lo Bosco

If a decade ago a friend, speaking to you at a party, predicted that in this very century it might be possible to download the human mind into a computer, marry a made-to-order android, or live in a virtual reality, you may have decided that your friend sorely needed professional help. What if that friend opined that in a mere ten years a major corporation like Google would declare a project to solve the problem of death? Would you still have worried about your buddy’s mental health?

Ray Kurzweil, a renowned futurist and author of How To Create A Mind and The Singularity Is Near, claims that soon there will be “software-based humans” who will “live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms.”  He is neither crazy nor alone. Such luminaries as roboticist Hans Moravec, cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, neuroscientist David Eagleman, and a host of others agree that human beings will soon merge with an exponentially expanding technology that will make much of the stuff of science fiction seem tame by comparison. David Levy, a leading researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence (and author of the preface to our book) claims that by 2050 human beings will wed robots. One wonders how Google will be faring on its war with death by then. Will there be options for immortality, like living in a virtual reality, or in a robot body, or in a flesh-based one whose life is greatly extended by nano-bots that circle the blood stream on search and destroy missions for invaders and wayward cells?

The debate about such strange possibilities notwithstanding, the fact that they are taken seriously by first-rate thinkers and are guiding research and technological funding and development carries an important subtext: the posthuman age has now begun, and we seem poised to take charge of our evolution with a vengeance.

Though science-based technology has greatly improved human life over the last five centuries, it hasn’t done much for our existential self-esteem. Following Copernicus's thesis, Galileo was among the first to kick humanity out of the center of the heavens by proving that we live in a sun-centered cosmos. In one fell swoop he shattered medieval cosmology and cracked a huge fissure in the edifice of revealed knowledge. Not surprisingly it took the Catholic Church three-and-a-half centuries to pardon Galileo after his death. Darwin struck the next great blow to humanity’s sense of cosmic entitlement by putting forth the theory that variation and natural selection could account for all the species of life. Humans could no longer regard themselves with special privilege as created apart from animals. Darwin’s theory was fully vindicated by the science of paleontology and later by molecular biology. Following Darwin, Freud effectively argued that we are aware of only a small fraction of our mental and emotional life at any moment, the majority of what we do and why we do it relegated to the vast unconscious. No longer the center of the universe, we were not even in charge of our own minds! As science progressed, it chipped away at the notion of the miracle of life, the hope of an intelligent and benevolent creator, and the immutability of the immortal soul. By the twentieth century, Occam’s razor had given humanity a very close shave. As the theoretical physicist Steve Weinberg once said, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”

Yet however pointless and accidental one now believes the cosmos to be, science-based technology appears to be turning the tables with a slew of mind-blowing possibilities. Many of them are already in our grasp: cloning and fertility advances, body modifications that include artificial organ parts, valves and shunts, prosthetic limbs, cochlear implants, and biometric chips, all of which have led science journalist Chip Walter to replace the term Homo sapiens with Cyber sapiens--creatures part-digital and part-biological. Advanced genetic engineering that will help us treat and even eliminate a range of diseases and quantum computing that will make the current supercomputers resemble an abacas by comparison are already in the making. Though no one can predict with accuracy where the next fifty years will take us, one thing is certain. What’s happening is very big and it’s rapidly ushering in an era in which human beings and their technology merge, challenging the realities of the physical body and its constraints of time and space. What it means to be human and what is meant by the word “reality” will likely change more in the next one hundred years than they have over the last five thousand.

One interesting upshot from all this is that our cosmic self-esteem might finally be getting a big boost. Though our science once cast us from the center of the universe, eventually reducing the significance of the cosmos and our existence to an accident without inherent meaning, it is now undergoing a sea change that is granting us the ability to take control of our own existence like never before. Victims of the law of nature, we hope to use those very laws to change the nature of our own evolution, making our insignificance very significant indeed. In the new HBO series, Silicon Valley, one of the characters says, “For thousands of years, guys like us have got the shit kicked out of us. But for the first time we’re in an era where we can be in charge and build empires. We can be the Vikings of our days.”

THE BEADY SAYS: HUMANITY IS TURNING INTO AN ALGORITHM.

  ( One Minute read) We are just an accident of creation an algorithm of evolution and technology is only created by our minds, with our imaginations. The Internet allows for our humanity in modern-day times to interconnect and promote globalization and information sharing. Without imaginations, no technology would have been created and with the decoupling of intelligence and consciousness our…