Trembling on the Brink
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.Every decision requires a choice, for with limited resources we can't pursue all options forever. Yet making each choice locks us into a certain path, and, as we make more and more choices, our path becomes more and more definite and less and less like any other path we could have taken. Because we can't foresee all possibilities, the path we end up walking often isn't the path we intended to walk when we took our first faltering step.
Helen Keller, Let Us Have Faith
In our time, that first step was the invention of the computer. Although few realized it at the time, the computer is an undifferentiated information manipulator. So we can use it to extend our intelligence, just as we use books to extend our memory. As it isn't specific to any one task, we can use it for everything. And that fact changes everything.
We're good at some things and bad at others. Doing long calculations and weaving intricate silk patterns are two things we're bad at. So we invented a device that can do easily what we find hard. Later we found many other uses for our new device, and these new uses started forcing us to leave our old, comfortable occupations and find other jobs. That ejection from traditional ways of life also freed us to do things we enjoy and are good at. Unfortunately, that same machine may one day become good at the things we're good at. What will we do then?
Our society is now undergoing enormous technological changes. The computer is at the center of them all---if not as a direct cause then as an irreplaceable helper. Computers are everywhere, and they're moving deeper into the woodwork and farther from our sight all the time. In time, they'll slip inside us and some of us will become something new---something alien.
Like the steam engine, like the dynamo, like the telephone, the computer is an accelerator. It accelerates every process in our society. By letting us think better, faster, and cheaper it's hurled us into an era of technological change undreamt of just fifty years ago. But that pace is hard for us to manage because not long ago our lives moved to our pulse beat. Nothing could happen much faster than that because nothing moved to our command unless we moved it first. Now that we've deployed millions of decision-making machines to do things for us, however, our lives move to a metronome's beat. And someone, somewhere, is always cranking up the tempo---and pumping up the volume.
Our technology changes far faster than our biology can. Our biology hasn't changed for thirty-five thousand years. Evolution has spent millions of years shaping us to be very good at coping with the world as it was up to, say, two hundred years ago when automation first began to seriously bleed into our societies. Today though, our technology is far beyond fire and stone and water, and we're continually playing catch up with it---never quite in time with the beat, never quite ready for the next set of dance steps it requires of us.
That's been true for at least the last two centuries, ever since the industrial revolution. What's special today is that because of the computer, an undifferentiated intelligence amplifier, our technology has nearly reached critical mass and is now juggernauting us around the dance floor at such a pace that we may never again be able to stop and catch our breath. Now prisoners of the dance, we're moths irresistibly attracted to the flame of technology. Prometheus, disguised as a scientist, has given us that flame. But fire also burns.
In the long human haul that is our life, we're now forced to gouge out our hearts and slowly murder our old selves in a never-ending search for new ways to live in this, the newest empire our own minds have made for us. Enmeshed deep within the mechanism and crying for simpler times, we seem able only to muddle along in idle despair, cringing at the coming of our own new millennium.
But while change is painful, it's necessary too. Without it, without turbulence and decay and unity in variety, there's no rebirth, and life stagnates and dies. We fear change, but perhaps we should fear lack of change more, because the ultimate lack of change is death. It's change itself that brings meaning and richness to life. How peaceful would be our lives without all this constant change; how peaceful, how tranquil---and how dull.
A strange new world is coming, and coming fast, partly brought into being by a strange new machine. For various short-term and inescapable reasons of our own we're rapidly creating an empire of the mind, and now we must find some way to dwell in it. Our future is filled with enormous danger, yes, but it's also filled with unimaginably exciting possibility. Everywhere, life seems to be gathering itself for a great leap forward. After millions of years of slow germination, we're rapidly beginning to flower.
We, all of us, are part of the most thrilling adventure ever unleashed on planet earth. Instead of looking backward in anger and fear, let's look forward to the next dance step in the adventure we're crafting for ourselves. A century or so from now, the earth may simply be the home world of a species rich and strange, a fiercely new and amazingly interesting species---transhumanity. The human adventure is just beginning.
Let's dance.
My Thanks