Politically, I am a Technoprogressive. There is no Technoprogressive political party in my country (and very few if any on the entire planet), but if there was one where I lived I would certainly join it. In NZ the one probably closest to the mark is the Labour party, so I have been supporting them. Unfortunately folks in my home town don’t seem to think about the future all that much, so I wonder about moving at times. San Francisco is tempting, for instance.
Technology is progressing at an accelerating rate. 10 years ago I never would have expected some of the technological wonders we currently experience in the western world. On the other hand, much of humanity is still starving, uneducated, and poverty stricken. I think we have to make more progress in the social justice dimension, and that technology can help us do it. This is one of the key tenets of technoprogressivism.
Recent improvements in technology, and in particular the rise of the internet, have brought us to a point where some sociopolitical and environmental problems that previously seemed intractable may no longer be so. I’m excited to see how that is going to play out over the next decade or two.
I am not one of those who think that technology alone can solve our problems, one has to consider the sociopolitical and environmental issues as well. Otherwise, technology just allows us to make bigger mistakes, faster. At the moment, we only have the one biosphere, and we’re screwing it up.
The internet is my biggest interest area for two reasons – one is the ability to change people’s attitudes towards eachother by bringing them closer together, the other is the massive increase in collaborative and collective intelligence.
Previous power structures from the age of info-poverty are still adapting to this, and some of them are truly threatened by it, but at this point they will either have to adapt or die, because “you can’t fight the internet” – or at least, not for long.
The domains of science, technology, politics, economics and culture are, as ever, connected in complicated and interesting ways, but the connections are now mediated via the internet and as a result, evolving much faster. The internet is only about 30 years old, or 40 if you go back to the earlier ARPANET, and it’s most important application, the world wide web, is not yet 20. The internet is not yet completely open and ubiquitous, but that appears to be the way it is heading.
An open and ubiquitous internet does have downsides. We have the NSA using it to gather more information on everyone than ever before (with or without a warrant), and we have criminals building huge techno-empires constructed from millions of hijacked PCs. We still don’t know how either of those things is going to play out.
There are many in the world who appreciate the progress that technology has brought them, probably now more than those who fear and distrust it. There is, as Dale Carrico puts it, a coming technoprogressive mainstream. From 2001-2006 things were looking very dark indeed, but we appear to have come through that, in no small part due to the power of the internet.
One huge brake on progress for many years was of course the Bush Administration and the GOP, who gutted the science infrastructure of America and diverted an incredible amount of resources into creating the world’s most appallingly destructive distraction in the Middle East, but with Obama putting adults in charge of America again, and encouraging more sensible governance around the world, we can get back to building the future. Or, just as importantly, distributing the future that is already here.
“The future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” – William Gibson.
One really interesting question about the future, to my mind, is not whether we’ll collapse after the oil runs out (there are so many alternative energy projects underway right now, it’s going to get sorted), but whether we are approaching what some people call the Singularity – the biggest tipping point of all – when we start to create machines smarter than we are. We might live to see that. If so, it will certainly be interesting.
A few other things I would like to see happen in my lifetime:
- Effective Emulation of the Human Brain on commodity level hardware.
- Engineered Negligible Senescence – ie, reliable human rejuvenation.
- Significant Bionanotechnological improvements to the basic human platform.
- Proof that there has at one time been Life Elsewhere (LE).
- Proof that there was at some time, Intelligent Life Elsewhere (ILE)
- Reasonable Proof that there is currently ILE
- First contact with ILE
- A “Theory of Everything” that passes peer review.
- Practical Quantum Computing
- Hooking up our legacy brain wetware to new artificial subsystems – effective intelligence expansion.
- Figuring out faster than light travel (this is the least likely of the lot, due to the causality problem).
- We find a way to engineer the end of suffering.
- We see the end of war as a means to win elections and/or crack down on civil rights.
- We see the end of war as a means to increase corporate profits or boost the domestic economy
- The Third World catching up with the First World in all significant development indexes.
- Effective harnessing of solar and tidal power, along with better batteries, bringing about the end of the oil age.
- Man colonizing the moon, Mars, and anywhere else that makes sense.
- Affordable Passenger Space Travel
- An attempt at STL Stellar Travel if FTL is still found to be impossible.
- Restoration of the Ozone Layer to pre 1900 levels.
- The Glaciers starting to grow back.
To some extent, I would like to play a part in as much of this as possible. Either by creating tools that are useful for the people making it happen, by providing useful suggestions or encouragement, and/or by making some money and then some appropriate and tactical donations.
Some of those problems will become easier if we get human-brain-emulator systems up to speed – or, more relevantly, up to speeds greater than what we can achieve on our current wetware. I suspect that the about-to-become-legacy thinking-platform called the “Unaugmented Human Brain” probably has about 50-100 years to remain relevant from the point of view of progressing science and technology.
This is all more or less plausible. I’ll link to some more things later. I did mention that we are living in Interesting Times?
