6 reasons why we’re on the beginning of history

How much do you know about ancient Egypt? Most probably not more than about the Medieval period. But the truth is that the ancient Egypt era lasted for 3000 years, 1000 years more than our time from the birth of Christ. For most, this all represents “just” the beginning of history. But looking forward, I believe we are ourselves, together with the ancient Tutankhamen, Constantine the Great and Hitler in the beginning of the history. The people of the future will remember the time before the Web when there was not much information available (just like we don’t have too much information about the ancient Egypt) and the time after the Web.

In the end of 2012, an article “Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems” got viral. Just starting my career and trying to understand the technology world, I agreed fully with the article. It also made me feel a bit empty and discouraged about the future. Today I know that this article could not be more wrong. But it was a valid point though, it was the time we were just starting to understand and embrace the Internet, the second Internet bubble had just burst and lot of people felt — “Is that it?”, “Is it all we can do?”.

People tend to overestimate the short term effects of technology and underestimate the long term influence. Communication tools and social networks tend to be the first wave of new web technologies — it is communication that is our very basic need and most logical thing to do with any new technology that allows it. And as biased as we might be about the value of Facebook and other social media, they are very important communication platforms that enable us to go forward, to achieve more and to explore further. It is the communication tools that have enabled thousands of people to find each other to build greater products and technologies. Thanks to the instant information flow, we have managed to exponentially increase the time to launch new technologies.

The planet Earth will ultimately become our vacation resort — a nice place to visit the museums of history about the beginning of time

After overcoming the boring get-to-know era of Internet and having the simple but necessary tools to unite as one huge brain, we are today in a much more interesting era than we were 4 years ago, because never before in human history, have we seen so many big trends where each one of them will change the way we live forever and combined together, the effect will be even greater. Here are 6 reasons why we do live in an extremely transformative time, why we are in the beginning of history.

Everything gets connected. Things get connected, People get connected

During our generation, the Web really gets big and reaches everywhere. We have moved from offices getting connected to homes to mobile handsets to cars to everything else (Internet of Things) to humans. This means that soon enough the Web as a term will basically die out as everything will be Web, everything will be Internet and everything will be connected. Internet and mobile is all old news for most of us. The boom of Internet of Things is just peaking as we speak and after that, we, the humans, will get connected. And no, not with smartphones or glasses or external devices. We will be physically, biologically connected so that we will never need to remember where we left our phone, our keys, credit card, we will be all of that. Internet becomes part of us, something that we won’t even see is there.

This will be the final stage of the Web, of getting connected. This will be significant for the beginning of history as from this time onwards, the people of the future will fully see back to the history, and they will ultimately understand everything that happened back in the days. They can go back in time and see if their great-grandfather visited a certain country or had problems with his back or if their kids witness lot of stress at their school or if their future kids might have any health issues, or see what were the most emotional moments of their mother. People will be able to see who was the person who introduced an alien species to the local lake or who polluted the river. Who was the one who actually started a global trend. Who was responsible for the crime or set of events that started 100 years ago. People will be able to make accurate predictions on traffic, politics, crime, entertainment and much more.

After fully entering the Internet era, the time before it will be like the dark ages, the future people won’t understand how the people of today could even live in such an uncertain time.

See also: Free video course on how to built your first digital product

Life expectancy and medicine

Our future generations will never see a person with a missing leg or hand. We will stay in history as the generation that started to become cyborgs (short term for “cybernetic organism”). There will be a lot of time until we see a real human like robot out there, if we ever will, but what we will see much earlier than we think, is humans becoming cyborgs. Already today, we are becoming to see high-tech artificial limbs that are actually better than our own biological limbs. People who have lost their leg or hand can order themselves a new limb that is much stronger, tougher and lighter. And if something should happen to it, you can always order a new one.

The same thing will happen with other body parts — heart, liver and other. Together with developments in the biorobotics, scientists are also learning to grow different body parts that are the exact replica of your own and are indeed biological.

The people of future will be able to live in the biggest cities of the world while also having perfect air conditions, clean streets, clean food and enjoyable environment

So it is easy to see that the human life expectancy will grow exponentially during our generation and the future humans might not be so 100% humans as we are used to see. An average 200 year old lady in the future might be only 10% human but still have more strength, be more durable and also smarter (this is also due to the fact that she is 200 years old) than we are in our twenties.

All of those technologies are tested and proved to work already today, so we will be the generation to make it a standard.

Countries start to disappear — money, bitcoin, e-residency

Our generation will stay in history as the generation who started the trend of the governments to disappear, it’s another those many trends that started “in the beginning of history”. But don’t worry, the governments will not disappear during our lifetimes, it will take much more time. But we will be the ones to create basics, the fundament for this trend to continue. We have been the ones to start the digital money, which initially left out the need for cash, then the need for physical banks and now the need for geographical and political restrictions (take Bitcoin for example).

Similar things will start to happen with governments and government services, they will just take more time (banks are hard to crack, but governments will be even more). Estonia is probably the first country in the world to fully exist in the cloud, if Estonia should lose its territory, it will continue to operate fully on cloud. Additionally, last year Estonia opened its digital borders for anyone in the world to join with their e-residency program and take advantage of the country’s digital government solutions. Soon enough (or more like a hundred years or so), the digital residents will not need a physical residence, they will choose the government services they wish to use (social security, infrastructure, tax profiles, business administration and other) online and buy them from governments digitally like they would buy their cinema tickets.

Soon after that, the countries and governments will exceed to exist as we know it, or more accurately, the government of the future will mean something other than they do today. The countries that are not able to adopt, find themselves out of people and out of cash, they will go bankrupt like companies do from time to time.

Read also: about our own eResNetwork — world’s safest business network that is leveraging the trend of digital identiy.

Climate

We have been the generation to really see and briefly understand the climate and nature of the earth, with it the scale of effect humans have on it. We have also globally accepted it (2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference), which is, believe it or not, a big thing. From here, things can only get better (ok, not really, they can still be going worse from the inertia) — we will be the ones to change the course of climate.

The people of future (not us) will be able to live in the biggest cities of the world while also having perfect air conditions, clean streets, clean food and enjoyable environment. In addition to the huge impact on health and emotional health of people and nature, advances in cleantech will also provide us more free time, more entertainment, more recreation — energy will ultimately become free.

People tend to overestimate the short term effects of technology and underestimate the long term influence

The people of the future will be much more happy and emotionally stable. Until that we have to work hard to achieve it, to cover up for the bad decisions our predecessors made.

Power shift from men to women to people

One of the reasons why the earth got so screwed up, was because the world was led by men. Men tend to have a very analytical, numeric and technical view on things. This seemed to work well in the industrial age — everything got optimised, everything was used to the maximum limit. This all was important to get us where we are today, but now the power has been shifting to women (yes there are still many men on picture, but that doesn’t mean too much — men like to be on picture, women prefer to be on power) and the world is shifting to be more compassionate, considerate and open. As the world needs balance rather than men or women on power, the next step will be the power of people.

The future societies will be much more like the ancient Athenian democracy (even if it is digital) where everyone has a word on play. However this might happen when the world has also seen the inconsistency of women on power — it takes time for the masses to learn balance, to find the golden mean.

We’re the ones to start colonising another planet

And for the last, I have left probably the biggest trend of our time — we are the ones who started the project of colonisation of another planet. With obvious reasons, this will change the life of people in the future fundamentally — from a local species dealing with the “small problems” of the earth becoming an interplanetary species travelling between planets, expanding our presence on different planets and ensuring our existence for eternity.

The planet Earth will ultimately become our vacation resort— a nice place, people will visit during their vacation to visit the museums of history about the beginning of time.

Read also: 6 technologies that are changing the way we live and how to use them for your business

Bonus: Quantum computer & Artificial Intelligence

Scientists are currently working to build the quantum computer. Without getting into technical details, this kind of computer could enhance computing capacities significantly and it would speed up all the above trends and make technology move even faster. Among accurate weather predictions and breaking every encryption and password on planet, it can have other results that are very hard to predict. Quantum computers in their core work differently from the computers we have today and at least in the beginning they might not substitute our computers.

Another hot topic is artificial intelligence (AI) that the whole world is talking about — thousands of people around the world are working on it but, in my mind, I would dare to doubt that we will see the artificial intelligence that we envision, in our lifetime. It is hard to predict the things you don’t know but I believe, it takes much more time to build a real kind of creative / independent thinking artificial intelligence just yet.

One way to build a true AI is to build a simulation of a human brain but this will also not happen any time soon as scientist have managed to simulate 1% of human brain using the fourth most powerful supercomputer on earth. It took the computer 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of human brain activity. So you can imagine that we are still a long way from simulating & mapping the human brain, and I believe, as long as we don’t really understand our brain, we are also not able to build something as powerful as our brain is. Quantum computer would be a huge leap forward in here but overall I would still think that we are not able to build a real artificial intelligence in our lifetime. Hence I did not include it in the above list.

by Erik Ehasoo, Mobile Business Strategist, ICT Futurist & Opportunist