It was here. It was finally here. Adam couldn't believe it. He and 9 billion others had seen it coming, but he still couldn't believe it. "I should have prepared for this day", he thought. But he was prepared and he knew it.
Several things had led the world to this point. And indeed it was the most significant point in human history. It had begun with the early prehistoric men creating sparks from stone and men shaping their thoughts into words. It was pushed ahead by great and illustrious men and women who rose above the ordinary and stood up as beacons of light guiding the ship of humanity. Aristotle, Alexander, Buddha, Hitler, Mozart, Shakespeare, Picasso, Da Vinci, Darwin, Einstein, Neil Armstrong, Sagan, Dawkins and hundreds of others would have deserved to witness this day. But even the most foresighted seers and visionaries would have hardly imagined that this day would be here so soon. And it was rightly so, for the imagination belonged to no single mind.
What it finally came down to was the ever-so-cliched paradigm that technology had progressed at an exponential rate. Moore's law had exceeded expectations and had entered the realm of genetic engineering. The Internet had connected billions of minds on the planet to create a consciousness wise enough to ban wars and find common religious ground. Something that had not been achieved in 4 million years of human existence had been achieved in 40 years. Economics, the biggest frictional mechanism that had tied down technology, had been overhauled by the elimination of money as a metric of value. The small open-source movement that had begun as a tool of collaborative development, had overrun capitalism and communism. But there were cracks that nobody had seen--yet.
Information had continued its journey from atoms to DNA to brains to technology, and was at the gateway of the fifth epoch as theorized by the wise old man of modern day, Ray Kurzweil. Technology had merged not just with human minds but also with their bodies. There were nano-computers small enough to be embedded into human cells grown from stem cells, and disease was nearly eradicated. Quantum computers had revolutionized logic itself. The concern about energy had been abruptly lifted with the advent of nuclear fusion. The misleadingly named Chaos theory had given an exquisitely beautiful and contradictorily simple answer to the complex machinery of networks ranging from vehicular traffic to weather prediction, from neurons in the brain to the social dynamics of the world. Some said this was utopia. They were mistaken. There were some frontiers yet unconquered--time, and the speed of light. Humans were still bound to this thread which had brought them to this moment.
The moment of the Technological Singularity. The point when the age of the Homo Sapiens ended and when man could now steer the direction of his evolution. Today was the day that the age of the Homo Evolutis would begin. Today was the day that Alpha Dawn, the computer that surpassed the collective intelligence of the entire human species, would be switched on.
Dec 23rd 2048. Adam, the super-conscious being, took a collective deep breath. The Singularity was here.
I assume you have read Asimov's idea of Gaia. Infact there are entire books written on this concept - a superbeing, having one large collective consciousness.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, read Ayn Rand's Anthem, or Orwell's Animal Farm/1984 to see what the 'collective' might lead to on the dark side.
As for Homo Evolutis: Nice name! You came up with it??!
Yep!...read the entire foundation series...and Anthem and 1984...but my main influence in writing this was some stuff I came across about the possibility of these things actually happening pretty soon...you should read stuff from Ray Kurzweil...There's even a Singularity University that has been set up...
ReplyDeleteas for Homo Evolutis I think I came across it in either a ted talk or some Tool song :)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mindboggling_new_science.html