The Future

"Won't be nothin' you can measure any more.
The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshhold
And overturned the order of the soul."
- Leonard Cohen, The Future

Cohen's darkest song used to seem pregnant with unfortunate truths, a bleak but accurate outlook on the spiritual development of our species. These days for me it simply forecasts something to avoid, and is a ditty to enjoy for its daring and poise. For the more I read about potential scientific developments, the stronger my optimism.

Without the time or the inclination to delve into futurism/transhumanism for the uninitiated, I thought I'd simply post a timeline of interesting events-to-come for those who need cheering up. These are not from any lunatic-fringe scientist who has read too much Timothy Leary, but no less an authority than Raymond Kurzweil, the man once described as "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison," who in the 1980s correctly predicted such diverse subjects as the growth of the internet in the 1990s (as well as broadband in the 2000s), the fall of the Soviet Union and the superceding of human chess players by computers.

Next year
- Computers to no longer be distinct physical objects. Perhaps be a part of your clothing!
- Supercomputers will have the same raw power as human brains.

2010s
- Eyeglasses that beam images onto the users' retinas to produce virtual reality to be developed.
- The VR glasses will also have built-in computers featuring "virtual assistant" programs that can help the user with various daily tasks. One useful function of the virtual assistant would be real-time language translation for the user.

2020s
- Personal computers will have the same raw power as human brains.
- Nanomachines for medical purposes such as hyperaccurate brainscans and, more impressively, "feeding" human cells, replacing the need for traditional consumption of food.
- With food consumption and therefore hunger now obsolete, the age of the cyborg begins proper.
- Virtual reality becomes indistinguishable from reality itself.
- Nanomachines eliminate threat of pathogens, eliminating disease.
- First real AI created with all the potential of the human mind.

2030s
- The paths of nanotechnology and virtual reality cross. Practical uses include functional telepathy with other humans and similar immediate interfaces with computers.
- Humans can now alter their own intelligence, personality, memories and senses at will. We choose our own paradigm shifts more effectively, potentially eliminating war.
- Humans can upload their minds completely into machines.

2040s
- Human body 3.0. What's this? It can alter its shape and external appearance at will via nanotechnology. Organs are also replaced by superior cybernetic implants.
- Virtual reality becomes more popular than reality.

2045
- The coming of the Singularity: the technological Ubermensch. AIs surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on; thus the machines, acting in concert with those humans who have evolved into humanoid androids, achieve effective world domination. The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of AIs appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
- Sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

Post-Singularity
- Computer transistors cannot be shrunk any more. Computers become bigger to become better again. Result? Earth becomes one giant computer coexisting with natural beauty.
- Space domination begins. AIs branch out, converting the rest of the universe bit by bit from inanimate matter to intelligent artificial sentience.
- Entire universe becomes giant, highly efficient supercomputer. Abrogation of the laws of Physics, interdimensional travel, and eternal life for what was once the human race.

Or we could just all live on farms. Either way I'm happy.

An attempt to reconcile my politics with my philosophy

At the risk of offering anecdotal evidence, in my experience, arborescent thinking often leads to people compartmentalising their political allegiances and their philosophical leanings into two seperate entities. I suspect am guilty of this myself, but my excuse is that the immediacy of politics often make them collide with philosophy, which is often more of a long term goal. This seems quite contradictory, and is a model that has failed to work throughout the Western world until one section, the Far Right, gave up on utopianism all together, with the Left soon following with the collapse of the Soviet Union. These defeatist attitudes have left us in a state of aporia. We now seem to live purely in the present: if someone strikes you, you strike them back, often in the name of peace. In the end, as in the Middle-East/USA conflict, we forget who threw the first punch, and if we're lucky to be actively literate, recall the morally bankrupt British hand in the formation of Israel or the States' support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, but to no end goal. One is reminded of the comical conflict between the offenders and the defenders in Finnegans Wake, who eventually become one all-encompassing concept: the fenders.

I sometimes think that as beings with a functioning cerebral cortex, we have to be hypocritical, or at least non-doctrinal. When philosophy or science, both, I agree with Rorty, types of literature, become dogmatic, they cease to be good philosophy or good science. Yet the scale of the hypocrisy must be measured. Being flexible does not have to mean supporting Israel when you did not support apartheid South Africa. (In fairness, commentaries on Hamas have very much resembled what Reagan and Thatcher said about Nelson Mandela; although I of course agree with Edward Said that Palestine is still waiting for its version of Mandela.) And surely, the best way to solve a problem like Israel/Palestine, to continue using a topical example, is for all concerned parties to look at what the country must eventually become in order to be allowed to co-exist with the modern world - a cosmopolitan liberal democracy not unlike South Africa - and work backwards from there.

What is my preferred end product? I am unashamedly an anarchist. Yet all movements that seem to be a step in the direction of anarchism range between distasteful and downright cruel. Take, for instance, economic libertarianism, which shares an incestuous bed with both anarcho-capitalism and Randian Objectivisim. I am in this sense a socialist and a Left-winger, largely because the Marxists, in setting themselves up as mutual enemies of capitalism, have had the largest successes in criticising the status quo (with the possible exception of Bakunin, one of the first to rightfully point out that dogmatic Communism would lead to totalitarianism). So whilst I agree with, say, anarcho-syndicalists, in many respects, I can't help but feel they are focusing their efforts in the wrong area. The biggest question anarchism has had to face (I have witnessed and participated in some beatdowns in debates against my fellow anarchists over this subject) is healthcare. Hence, why I have rarely agreed with a quote more than I agree with the utilitarian William Godwin's:

"Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behoves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe whether, in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished."

The more I look at the world around me, as officials close down my local libraries and my government fails again and again to make education a priority, I realise that those in power realise this, too, and continue to make their assault on knowledge in order to prolong their necessity. One should look no further than the frankly despicable recent election campaigns in the United States. John McCain's vow to run a clean, respectful campaign resulted in him calling his opponent everything from a sexist to a terrorist sympathiser to a Marxist to an elistist (any one of which I would probably have welcomed were they aimed at me ;)). And now we discover Barack Obama's claim to end torture and the British government's claim to condemn it were not only false but conspiratorially so.

The problem with philosophical anarchism is that it breaks down by the very nature of its passivity. The zeitgeist of what is right and what is wrong has most usually been changed by radical or revolutionary individuals, such as Gallileo or Martin Luther King, who broke down the consensus in order to create a new one. Unfortunately people such as the women's suffrage campaigners did not compell people by the moral superiority of their arguments but at the force, passion and single mindedness they delivered them with. We must then draw inspiration from publications such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which could, within the sphere of scientific thought, be seen as a violent act, taking into account the effect it had on preconceived notions of, say, spectroscopy. Because the truth is that every lie our governments tell us, every library they close, every piece of spin a company puts on a product, is an act of violence, and we must respond by spreading knowledge and tearing down falsehoods in order to be in a situation where we can turn the other cheek, in the manner described by Tolstoy in his seminal treaty The Kingdom of God is Within You, without fear of being struck by an ignorant and powerful fist. That is the sick irony of the situation: that the analogy of the battlefield is inescapable, and we must find when and where the ends justify the means.

I do not, then, agree with neo-Luddites, who have more in common with the prosophobic Right than they would care to admit. Quite the opposite. If we can create a culture where our philosophic and our scientific progresses are paramount, we can achieve the socially-just, transhuman world we so desperately need in order to vindicate ourselves as a species. Already we can talk of germline engineering and celular manipulation of longevity in nature.

Vice-President Joe Biden posing with futurist
Steve Jurvetson, a photo that has disarmed my cynicism, however briefly.

I think this might be why I do a literature degree. Anarchy needs literature like birds need wings. There is something frightening and beautiful about both, which is why I was drawn to them. But in truth, anarchy is not alone in this respect. As Shelly put it:

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument is to the agent, as the body is to the spirit, as the shadow is to the substance."

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause."

"Ethical science arranges the elements that poetry has created."

J.G. Ballard of course concurred but went a step further, saying that all fiction writers should be scientists. Whatever our political differences it might not be a bad thing to emphasise the things in life that matter, i.e. how we're all going to live together. Pride, partisanship and patriotism be damned if they get in the way. Long live science, literature and the arts. In my fictionalised review of the Sk-Interface exhibition I seemed justifiably frightened by a marriage of the three. But one guiding the other is probably not a bad idea at all, as long as that which is being lead does not fear rebelling from time to time: intellectual rebellion is the only way we truly advance.