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 to some extent. If had some free time (hah) and wasn’t thinking about moving to Silicon Valley, I’d be tempted to start my own party.
Technology is progressing at an accelerating rate. 20 years ago I never could have imagined the sort of wonders we are exposed to on a daily basis. On the other hand, much of humanity is still starving, uneducated, war-torn and poverty stricken, and I would like to see a lot more focus on addressing those issues rather than sitting around playing with the latest online games and techno-toys.
While it’s true that ignoring the suffering in other countries is nothing new, 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 were previously intractable may no longer be so. It’s no longer the case that we will inevitably be dissapointed should we get serious about trying to improve the lives of 3rd world citizens.
I am not one of those who think that technology alone can solve all our problems. Often one must address the sociopolitical and environmental issues at the same time. Otherwise, technology will just allow us to make bigger mistakes, faster. For instance, just right now we only have the one biosphere, and we’re screwing it up.
The internet is my biggest area of interest for two reasons – one is the opportunity to bring people closer together and make it harder for extremists to find and exploit towards xenophobia in many people, and the other is the massive increase in collaborative and collective intelligence.
Social power structures from the age of info-poverty are still adapting to this, and some of them will have to adapt or die, because, as they say, “you can’t fight the internet” – or at least, not for long.
The domains of science, technology, politics, economics and culture are connected in complicated and interesting ways, the connections are now faster and more elaborate than ever thanks to the internet and as a result, they are evolving much faster. The internet is only about 30 years old – 40 if you go back to the ARPANET days, and the web is not yet 20. Of course the internet is not yet completely ubiquitous and uncensored, but that appears to be the way things are heading.
An open and ubiquitous internet does have downsides. We have the NSA using it to gather more information on everyone than ever before, we have criminals building huge techno-empires constructed from millions of hijacked PCs, and we have a huge number of techno-conmen searching for new ways to part fools and their money, and we still don’t know how all this is going to play out.
There are many in the world who appreciate the progress that technology has brought them – hopefully more than those who fear and distrust it. There is, as Dale Carrico puts it, a coming technoprogressive mainstream.
A huge brake on technoprogress for many years was of course the Bush Administration, who gutted the science infrastructure of America and diverted an incredible amount of resource into the world’s most appallingly distraction in the Middle East, but with Obama putting adults in charge of America again, and inspiring 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 things will 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.
- First contact with Intelligent Life Elsewhere (ILE), or at least proof that it exists.
- Practical Quantum Computing.
- A “Theory of Everything” that passes peer review.
- An explanation of human consciousness that actually makes sense to me.
- Some way to hook up our legacy brain “wetware” to artificial subsystems.
- Figuring out faster than light travel (this is the least likely of the lot I think).
- We find a way to engineer the end of suffering.
- We see the end of war as a means to win elections and crack down on civil rights.
- We see the end of war as a means to increase corporate profits and boost the domestic economy
- The Third World catching up with the First World in all significant development indexes.
- Effective harnessing of solar, and eventually fusion power, along with better batteries, bringing about the end of the oil age.
- Humans 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 some of this. Either by creating tools that are useful for the people making it happen, by providing useful suggestions or encouragement, or by making some money and making some appropriate and tactical donations.
Some of those problems will get easier if we get human-brain-emulation up to speed, find ways to augment our own wetware, or create true “general” artificial intelligence. 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. But we can go a long way just by improving how we work with our existing tech.
I did mention that we are living in Interesting Times?
