A Future Long Past
As the fields of green wheat flash before my eyes from the comfort of my air-conditioned car seat, I wonder what it was once like to live as a farmer. After all, humans were farmers for over 12,000 years. It’s only in the past few hundred that we took on more varied roles, where only a small percentage of Sapiens actually tend to the fields.
Is this why part of me longs for this life? To work with my hands, in the mud, sweating under the hot sun, reaping the fruits of one’s labor. Perhaps the spirit of thousands of my ancestors speaks through my bones, twirled and throbbing in the spiral helix of my DNA.
Or perhaps I daydream for days long past simply because we have come so far. With every line of code, every bite of data, we move further from what is real, further into the artificial, the unknown. When we eventually write software to mimic every object, every thought, every feeling in our world, will we still need the real thing? Or will this new artifice be the new ‘real’.
Software is eating our world. Like ice-9 in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, it will take over everything, spreading into every aspect of our lives. As we replace lost limbs with automated robotics, manufacture drugs to slow aging, modify fetuses for enhanced babies or manipulate our genes to improve our memory and storage capacity, we will move away from our evolved human selves. Technology has–and will–continue to hurl our evolution into overdrive.
Has this been the plan all along? Do we not find life in the universe, not because our type 0 civilizations collapse before ever leaving their solar systems, but because we evolve past our physical bodies, perhaps into another realm altogether? Or is our fate more like one Vonnegut envisioned, where the ice-9 gray goo encases us like ice, trapped in a never ending frozen state?
Of course, either future is too difficult to predict or even fully comprehend. Regardless, as Moore’s law holds true, and our speed and capacity within technology continues to double, a vastly different future is within our reach sooner than we think.
One thing is for certain for the technological age in which we live: one day, we will forever be changed. Too advanced, too distant from our formal selves to return. Like the wooly mammoth, we may unearth our ancestors as if from a block of ice and look upon them with remorse at a simpler life once lived, longing for times past and wondering what it must have been like to live like them.
For more information, I highly recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent books about humanity and it’s future:
Originally published at dogwithrug.com on July 2, 2015.
