By SCOTT DEWING
Published: August 2005

The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of this century…We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
—Vernor Vinge, addressing the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in 1993.

WHEN YOU CONSIDER that human beings have been evolving for the past 2 million years—from early Homo habilis to Homo erectus to today’s Homo sapiens sapiens—we’re still pretty stupid.

While we’ve gone from fire to central heating, caves to modular homes, bone clubs to high-caliber guns—we are, for the most part, still just striving to make it through another day. And while the only carnivorous dinosaurs we may encounter are in movies like Jurassic Park, when you get right down to it, we are still all about survival. We’ve evolved for 2 million years and still, today more than ever, man’s biggest threat to his existence is himself. The miracle of our very existence aside, you’d think we would have done a whole hell of a lot more with the past 2 million years.

All of this is about to change. Perhaps in your lifetime. I’m no seer of the future. I have no crystal ball or other future-predicting paraphernalia. I can, however, guarantee you that everything I tell you about the future will likely be wrong. I can promise you that the future will be quite different from today’s haughty predictions. And still, we reach out with the hands of the present to clutch again and again at the fleeting prize. On the wall of my office is pinned a quote from writer and futurist Damien Broderick to remind me of our future-predicting folly:

We will live forever; or we will all perish most horribly;
our minds will emigrate to cyberspace and start the most ferocious
overpopulation race ever seen on the planet; or our machines
will transcend and take us with them, or leave us in some peaceful
backwater where the meek shall inherit the Earth. Or something else,
something far weirder and unimaginable.

We will never achieve “artificial intelligence”, that is, the creation of machines with intelligence that rivals what 2 million years of evolution has accomplished in human beings. We will merge with our technology, slowly at first, then at a staggering rate. Our intelligence will be enhanced by computer implants, tiny filaments thinner than human hairs inserted directly into our brains.

In an afternoon, we will accumulate a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. Books will no longer be read but downloaded directly to our brains. Books will no longer be written, but uploaded to a central repository. We might still call this place the “World Wide Web”, but probably not. Some knowledge will be “open source”, that is, shared free-of-charge for all to download and consume. Other knowledge will be fee-based. Some knowledge will be pirated and trafficked like today’s music downloads. The intelligence gap will widen, with the wealthiest few being the most intelligent beings while the poor masses perform menial tasks like quantum engineering.

By augmenting our intelligence with technology, humanity will take a quick and giant step up the rungs of evolution. We will transform our bodies from these fragile and mortal collections of blood and bone. Humans will become modular and upgradeable. Some of us will live forever, not as bodies, but as pure consciousness stored within some gigantic neural network. But most of us will perish in the crucible of the universe’s many misfortunes.

We will leave Earth and colonize the galaxy. One day, we will discover life somewhere in the far reaches of the cosmos: raw organic life, oozing, fragile, strange and mortal. They will marvel at us and wonder if we are gods come down to either save or destroy them. We’ll assure them that we are not gods, that we are just “human beings” originated from a far-off planet called Earth. Or maybe we won’t make contact at all. Maybe we’ll just leave them alone to evolve in their own right, checking in on them now and again—like scientists, like curious gods—to see how they are coming along.

Some time ago I saw a witty bumper sticker plastered to the back of a Volkswagen van: “Where are we going and why am I in this hand-basket?”

Where are we going? That’s a question I often ask myself when thinking about technology and how it is shaping our prospective future. Sometimes that future looks to have the potential of being a bright nirvana of ecological sustainability, eradication of poverty, and evolution of the human species toward the egalitarian. Other times, that future is the shape of a hand-basket and it’s taking us to a hot place without ice cream and snowboarding. I cringe at this either/or scenario, but then, I remind myself that it is probably neither, that the future is not black and white. The future is a mosaic that will likely be “far weirder” than anything we can imagine today. And yet, it is that imagination that makes us uniquely human, that encourages us, that motivates us to become whatever it is we are destined to be.