Human history, complete.
Over the last fifty years, after attaining a fine classical and literary education, and a life of many years given over entirely to reading and philosophical meditation and journals, with no obligations to work or other worldly distractions, after writing several futuristic novels and now comfortably retired and pondering long and hard on what the next few decades will bring to humankind, pondering the whole spectrum of possibilities from extinction to new levels of empowerment and supremacy beyond our wildest dreams, I have a few ideas I would like to share.
I preface this essay just to get your attention. But it's the depth of my conjectures and the clarity of my reasoning only that's important. Whether I'm thirty or seventy makes no difference. It's the arguments that matter. They portend our fate, yours and mine and everyone's, and what's more important, human history itself, what turn it might take, whether it might mean living in some nightmare Armageddon, a few ragged survivors scraping by, all dignity and civilization gone, our planet a grey wasteland, victim to our climate follies. Or it might involve our technological advances in AI which displace and remove us as useless impediments to its own advance, we being the steppingstones to that progress and now no more than an uncomfortable rock underfoot along that steep and rugged climb to the mountain top.
The first of these grim pictures has a distinct probability from the evidences in our daily news, with the ever increasing destruction of all our natural resources and the concomitant migrations, wars, some religious, all irreligious, the rising brutality and chaos, disregard for life and dignity, disturbingly similar to the mentality and behavior of rats on a sinking and burning ship, taxing our infrastructure and eroding civilized society.
The second comes from extrapolation on my part, clues as to where technology might be leading us.
This requires an explanation, some flowchart of my logic, on the simple assumption that what we build with science and constantly improve it for our benefit, to better our lives and exalt our stature as creative and winning beings.
But my dark assumption supposes the opposite, that our inventions will better us, destroy us, that our ubiquitous internet, our phones recording us 24/7 and WiFi controlling most devices in our homes, all connected to supercomputer arrays, will bury us in perfect synchronicity with one quick command affecting every aspect of our lives, with speeds and powers and an omniscience we can't fathom or control as it achieves AI intelligence with a cold, logical behemoth eye, looking down on our mad motions, our ant-like meanderings, building up and tearing down, often at war with each other, fast destroying the only planet we have.
I could never dwell on such dire outcomes continually. That would be too depressing and ruin each day. Better to be the happy fool, eat drink and sit in the grass, pet dogs, throw crumbs to birds in a park along with a whole crowd of picnickers chatting around me.
But that's not in my thinking nature. I ply all my wits for a better possible outcome where Homo Sapiens, who has triumphed this far through so many hardships and trials through a million years and continues on, probably much changed, but still human at core, cognizant of his past and true to it, or all that suffering and effort would have been in vain. And our long timeline and collective experience puts supercomputers with their trillion, nanosecond blips to shame. We each have a trillion neurons in our skulls.
In fact 'shame' is not a word in their domain, nor 'love' nor 'pity' nor 'hope'. We have a whole dimension, a universal heart shared by all humanity which they will never fathom.
I don't think this will save us. I'm not a romantic. But I do believe our ingenuity just might. It's the same inventive, mysterious, creative power that built our nemesis and so many weapons of mass destruction.
My hope is that we can soon bond with and control nanotechnology, our brains at the helm, just as fast, aided by that link, with our extra dimensions added in. Logic is limited. Fancy is not.
My doubt is twofold.
The first is that we are so weak and vulnerable in this present state to new diseases and the slightest interruptions to our daily needs. We need air and water and food or we die within minutes or three days or a week. A punctured artery kills us in seconds. All our many organs work in unison and when one fails, they all topple like dominoes.
My dream is that we use science to invent ways to fortify ourselves, place our delicate minds into titanium robot shells for protection and 'shuffle off this mortal coil' as Hamlet said, with eyes of unbreakable glass, with a thousand times the fields and resolution, where no Duke of Cornwall can draw his knife in 'King Lear' and yell 'out, vile jelly' and blind his captive in an instant.
We might proceed by degrees and one by one perfect our immune systems, replace our organs with mechanical ones, reduce our vulnerabilities, steel our skin with gloves and clothing, decrease our need for water and air with cartridges and slowly transform into this robot, in body alone, not in mind.
We could even sharpen all our sensory perceptions at will and be more human and sensual than before.
Science puts all this within reach, within years. Only traditions hold us back.
But this just concerns our longevity and strength. The big breakthrough, which I expect will happen in the next decade will be the neural/silicon interface, plugging our brains directly into microchips and mainframes.
What puzzles me is the Web and WiFi. Can it infect us as we infect it so often, opening up a whole new can of worms.
I've often thought of these worms and Trojans and viruses as predictable, like the myriad illnesses that infect babies, because computers are in their infancy and like babies, and even worse off as they inherited none of their mother's defences, because they have no mother.
None of these ideas are mine. They're all in a myriad of modern movies I watch to excess.
My second doubt is that we'll never act collectively for our own benefit, for our planet or a sane future. The news shows this daily. Most men are animals. They are born fighters and brutes and oppressors and want to die shooting bullets. Their women are quiet victims, abused and slapped down if they speak up. Children are even quieter victims, whimpering in dark corners alone. Many are subdued and oppressed under ruthless dictatorships, working hard and bent over a bowl of rice at the end of the day, voiceless. The masses, when they collect, are a pathetic bunch. Not one in a thousand of their demonstrations succeed in changing anything, nor, for that matter, all the frequent demonstrations throughout America and Europe. It seems the common people have no common voice.
Only a few will read and comprehend this article. Even when I go on Twitter and Facebook no one notices. Nothing will change.
The rich can and will plot to save themselves. But I expect in most of their futures, their degenerate ethics, greed and vices, their uncooperative, backstabbing ways will drag each of them down with the rest of us as this 'Ship of Fools' slowly sinks in some dark trench at the bottom of the ocean.
The ship of fools
Maybe a few will survive inside some deep cave. The red sun will rise each morning into our changed, polluted skies but they won't see it.
Still, I'm an optimist. Nature is a miracle of rejuvenation and variety. There isn't a poison we can devise in our deepest labs that some organism can't eat, and a larger one that can digest it and another that can thrive on it, right up the food chain.
I feel a deep empathy towards all the life on this Earth, as it all contributed to creating us and however much we mutilate everything in our own madness and self-destructive course, or muddy the oceans for eons, I know this good planet will restore itself to its full glory until some wiser and a far more beautiful creature than us will emerge from the swamps a million years hence.
And for that we can all take credit in the most twisted, perverse logic, befitting our plight. So, on this slim pretzel of reasoning I can honestly say, I am an optimist.
If you're interested in the near future fictions I've posted on PublishOx here are the links:
https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/roland-house-xnnxllm
https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/the-whitening-xvmqrxl
https://www.publish0x.com/robert-oreilly/i-am-xgjmxdz
My ambassador link
https://www.publish0x.com?a=M7e59PBqe2
