Dean's World

I think Joel Garreau is on to something with this. I have for years been wondering about a coming conflict between the "artificial" and the "augmented." I had not considered there being a group of normal humans that are cut off from augmentation due to economic or geographic limitations. That's something to think about.

In the far future (what, 200 years?) What we think of as a "human being" could well be something you only find in nature preserves where the descendants of the Luddites live while augmented humans or AI beings run not just the Earth, but the entire solar civilization.

OK, 200 years may be too soon, but I dunno, things are moving fast.

I am in many ways a technologist. Or to put it another way, I believe that technology is a good thing, or that it has been a good thing throughout the entire known history of humanity. For every nuclear bomb, there are millions of toilets, for example, and toilets do a lot more to help every day for human beings than nuclear bombs have done to hurt. Of course toilets is just a representative example, medicines, refrigeration, transportation, communication, the list of technological boons is endless.

And you are right about it getting cheaper. There may very well soon be a day when computer chips are as cheap as potato chips. Literally. There are futurists out there who talk about disposable electronic paper or cloth. Imagine wearing an outfit that you can change from casual to formal simply by choosing an option. (Imagine doing it merely by thinking...).

I have stopped trying to think about the limit of human evolution, I'm just trying to figure out the next fifty years. What kind of world will my kids live in when they are my age?

And if they do solve aging and people can live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, where are we going to put them all? Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book fifty years ago titled "The City and the Stars" which describes a world where human beings no longer procreate because there is no need to. I can't help but find such a concept deeply troubling. But is it inevitable?

My cyberpunk fantasies edge ever closer...

Yes, there would obviously be such a limit, and so far as we know the ultimate logic gateway would be one constructed purely of light. We're quite a ways away from it though, and god knows how much we'll know by the time we get that close.

The fear of practical immortality in my view is vastly overblown. An observed fact of human nature is that once the median income breaches a certain amount--and it's not all that much, probably on the order of about $20,000 a year in purchasing power parity (i.e. that may be only about $3,000 a year or so someplace like India) the vast majority of humans cease to produce more than one or two children. And as I've noted, the equivalent of Moore's Law has been in effect for agriculture for decades now--we literally produce more food than the entire race needs to survive now, on an ever-dwindling amount of land. By the 1990s, technology already existed that could feed one person 365 days a year on 6 square feet of growing space. The only limit was energy--hydroponics are slightly more expensive than growing food in the ground. But only slightly, and a stack of what amounts to four bunk beds could feed a family of four all year 'round. That level of technology is now finding itself in more and more places, as a growing number of specialty markets are now using it to create produce straight to consumers right out of their own in-house facilities.

As I have noted in other places, there is no overpopulation problem in free societies. It doesn't exist. Whenever they finally do make Soylent Green, it won't be made out of people after all. The GDP and PPP of every nation that's at least partially free has been going up steadily for generations, and by the year 2100 at the latest--most estimates put it closer to 2050, some as soon as 2025 or so--the world population will begin declining if we don't do something to either encourage more kids or significantly extend lifespans.

I personally find it rather heartening to imagine a life in which couples can spend 30 or 40 years amassing a comfortable life, then give over time in their still-robust, still healthy 50s and 60s to have one or two kids, then go back to whatever life they want to persue other interests as they help their children find their own place in the world.

The worry of the "haves" vs. the "have nots" to me is basically one of freedom: once there is enough political freedom, as is found throughout most of the West and a growing percentage of the rest of the world, the "have nots" simply become "have lesses."

I note, for example, that in America you can have a family, a private apartment or house for that family, two cars, internal plumbing, internal heating, air conditioning, cable TV, working telephone service, free education through the 12th grade, abundant shoes and clothing appropriate for year-round weather, and a computer with basic internet connection--you can have all that and still be below the Federal poverty line.

Oh, did I mention that a majority of our "poor" people are overweight? They don't suffer from undernourishment, they suffer from an overabundance of high-calorie foods!

This level of economic development now describes at least a third of the world population. Another third is rapidly approaching it. The remaining third is approaching it haltingly--and they're all suffering under non-democratic, oppressive regimes.

What's funny about all this is that most people simply assume that most of it can't be true, and yet every single statement I just made is irrefutably true. Gregg Easterbrooke examines it quite well in "The Progress Paradox," which I thoroughly recommend reading. (And if you want to get even more radical, read Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource.)

Well, if they come up with the technology to affordably make me essentially immortal, they better come up with the technology to let me affordably travel the universe. Cuz sooner or later, I'll get really bored of seeing the same faces century after century.

I've been interested in this type of thing for at least fifteen years. One of my first attempts at a novel is titled Strategic Withdrawal which posited a form of superhumanity where the ability to form logical speculation that sounded reasonable overwhelmed the judgement with the result that most humans became mad gods if exposed to the process. I really need to finish that novel.

It also occurs to me that a Singularity may be a near dead end..unless you are a "saint". Otherwise, you create your own hell.

Another setting is a Total Surveillance Society entitled Black Box Imperium in which China and America join together to rule the world to ensure no madman develops a new tech and blows up the world. Problem is that this requires committee science, or almost no science progress, totalitarianism, and despite that it doesn't work that well, and the suicide rate is going through the roof as people give up in despair.

And I have a couple other settings dealing with this as well.

Now I find I like Garreau's perspective better than Kurzweill's. I haven't yet read Kurzweil, although I doubt there will be that much really new in it to me, but I've read some commentary spawned by his. When people start talking about human-level subhuman intelligences--that is, artificially focused sentients focused by an overmind, well, I'm not too happy. And when people start talking about the inevitability, I'm also not happy.

One person added to the concept of Rapture of the Geeks with an Apocalypse of the Geeks. The idea being that an apocalyptic scenario serves the pschyological need of someone who feels unjustly wronged by society. And imagining that the Geeks will inevitably triumph, and all those other stupid things will fade away, and that everything human level will be at best a butler to an overmind does not sound like a scenario created by someone with a love for humanity.

So I definitely find Garreau's perspective more appealing than some others.