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Just read this over at Wired.
When it comes to the pursuit of happiness, everyone, it turns out, has an opinion.
Everyone, as it turns out, just happens to include architects, scientists, explorers, Buddhist monks, comedians, primate researchers, dietitians, deep-sea divers, illusionists and Internet billionaires.
And that was only a partial list of the lineup of speakers and participants at a free-wheeling technology and design conference in Monterey, California, that also attracted corporate executives and famed Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn.
The eclectic group gathered on California's Central Coast to ponder the pursuit of happiness and the shape of the future at the annual TED conference.
Chris Anderson, the curator of the conference, told Reuters the gathering provides a four-day immersion in ideas, invention and fun at a time when many of its high-powered participants are reevaluating life's big-picture questions.
"A lot of people who have been incredibly successful over the years have been compelled to write a different agenda because of a combination of economic issues and 9/11," he said.
In a presentation entitled "Humor, Joy and Surprise in Design," Al Seckel, a neuroscientist from the California Institute of Technology, described illusions as "expectations that have been violated in some unexpected, pleasing way."
On the whole, TED participants were wildly optimistic about the future, with predictions that scientists in the years just ahead would solve the problem of aging, understand the nature of gravity and find another planet like Earth.
"Florence in the 15th century could have become the greatest military power in Europe with all its wealth and genius, but instead it chose to invest it in beauty," Seligman said.
"This is your Florentine moment and it only comes once in a millennium," he added. "The question we all have to ask ourselves is how are we going to use technology, entertainment and design to increase the tonnage of human happiness on the planet."
It's refreshing to see this elite group of movers and shakers start talking like this again. So the real question is are we finally at an historical juncture where we can finally spread this happiness and prosperity to the rest of the world, rather than just the 1 or 2% richest on the planet?
As Ashanti, author of the Afircan Drumbeat Blog, says,
Different people are in different places. Many people in Africa (and elsewhere) are focused on basic survival needs, because these are unmet. (Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a reference point). Food, shelter, housing, health care. Thus, they would not be in a position to think about the future, since their sole focus is on where their next meal comes from, or the fact that they have no roof over their heads, no access to adequate health care and sanitation, and so on.
Those who do have those needs met, are in a position to think constructively of the future, are in a position to construct awesomely wonderful blogs like FutureHi. I think that is wonderful.
But for those who cannot focus on anything other than their basic physical survival needs, who are suffering because of hunger or ill-health - they would not be able to contribute to initiatives like this, until their basic survival issues are met, and they can get past that.
I keep thinking of Bucky Fuller that says we are suffering from a design science crisis. But even knowing about the conditions of the third world is no reason to not continue to actively create a positive vision of these emerging technologies. They are coming, and coming soon. What's lacking in my opinion is a positive vision that is absolutely necessary if we are to survive it, and not end up like Bill Joy who said, "The future doesn't need us". Right now especially, people need a future they can believe in again. That's hard even for most people in the first world who have already stabilized their lower needs. There is such an atmosphere of fear being perpetuated almost everywhere I see, and it is so unnecessary, but worse entirely counter-productive.
I think the more liquid our economies become, the more prosperity will reach more people. I think of the experiment that was done by the IMF when they gave every citizen of Cairo $50, rather than the government the same amount of money in one-lump sum. This initiative resulted in thousands of new businesses coming into existence that was not there before. The challenge then is getting the knowledge and capital to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
The other pressing need is an environmental sustainable infrastructure. The thought of the rising middle class of China all driving automobiles running on oil is not a good sign. The sooner cleaner sources of energy become cost competitive the better. Time is running out. And finally there is the growing problem of resource depletion - especially deforestation. I just read last week how all of Borneo forest will be gone within 3 years! This is a terrible thing, and I'm not sure how to stop it, unless the people cutting down the forests have an ALTERNATIVE means of prosperity. So the challenge is getting those alternative forms of capital to those countries as quickly as possible before the global ecology goes into a tailspin.
"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.
"The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."
"...our descendants, and in principle perhaps even our elderly selves, will have the chance to enjoy modes of experience we emotional primitives cruelly lack: sights more majestically beautiful, music more deeply soul-stirring, sex more exquisitely erotic, mystical epiphanies more awe-inspiring, and love more profoundly intense than anything we can now properly comprehend..."
"This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life.... It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world."
"The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted."
"Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own."
To read the rest of this manifesto by David Pearce please visit The Hedonistic Imperative.
I agree with Jon Husband that technology alone is not the source of our enlightenment. I think positive change comes from subjective, deeply felt experience. But I think many of these tools have the potential to empower us to touch and feel the world in increasingly new and intimate ways. Sure, they they can just as easily be used to disconnect socially. But being that humans are largely social creatures, internet connectivity brings the world closer toghether than tears it apart, and will inceasingly do so as wiresless computing becomes ubiquitous.
David Weinberger mentioned the echo-chamber effect as a side effect of this connectivity, but this happens anyway among our peers. The internet connects us to more people of like mind, which in turn increases the overall level of intimacy than we would otherwise have.
In some people's eyes the bigger issue is why is the average American (not sure about Canadians), so socially alienated from their physically proximate neighbors? I think it's because our culture has celebrated the individual more than the most previous cultures.
Will these connecting technologies increase the amount of echo-ing at the cost of our already increasingly alienating physically proximate neighborhors? Or does this change is social space from physical proximity to mental/emotional proximity facilitated by the Internet, make our physical locations less relevant, both to ourselves and society as a whole?
I think the Internet, by allowing you to make a greater number of connections, increases the level of intimacy we have with those online buddies, which in turn enhances our sense of individuality. Whereas physical proximate space most often has us in proximity to a random mesh of values, beliefs, and social customs, which increases the pressure for us to adhere to the perceived collective norms.
Coming soon are location-based services, bringing more of physical space into cyberspace. Combine this with p2p social networking software and you could seriously increase the level of intimacy and connectivity possible with like-minded people who are close to you physically.
by Paul Hughes
A central thesis of my unpublished book on transhumanism is how customized hypermediation made possible by the symbiotic merging of our wetware, software and hardware via nanotechnology will vastly expand our experience of reality. This mind-machine symbiosis, for those of us who decide to take this journey, is called uploading.
The Senses and Emotions Have A Future.
Once we have merged into this accelerating intelligence, will we still have any need for our senses? In wild difference to Hans Moravec, who says that the senses don’t have a future, existing in some kind of simulated “body” with it's accompanying sensory array will allow us to experience information constructs differently than existing as pure thought. It could also be demonstrated that sensory experience is just another form of thought - the minds interpretation of raw signals transmitted by our senses. In this view sensory experience, internally generated or not, acts as another way to expand our useful set of contexts, perspectives and gestalts in which to process and interpret complex information. If we ditch the senses we would be cutting ourselves off from another way to experience reality. Expanded intelligence is about expanding our experiences, not limiting them. The future of intelligence then, is more sensory experience... more complex and enriching than anything we can possibly imagine right now.
Imagine this. It's about 10 years from now, and almost everyone has a real-time always-on connection to the Net via ubiquitous wearable "augmented reality" devices. As part of this package, made possible with advance minuturized heads-up displays, video cameras, location aware devices, GPS, swarmbots, emotion-sensitive and adaptive algorithms (i.e. Affective Computing), and sophisticated reputation systems, you are able to surf an augmented version of reality itself in real time.
Lets break this down. You would be able to, in real-time see precisely whats going on almost anywhere in the globe by jacking in to the collection of real-time video blogs. As part of this collection, sophisticated 3-D rendering engines would be able to take the collective video footage and extropolate a real-time VR scene, allowing you to transcend the viewing angle of any single camera. Better still, you could jack in to that part of the world from a variety of, not only physical perspectives, but political, intellectual, and emotional as well based on whatever any individual user makes public as part their unique sliding-scale trust system such as the type that Joi Ito has proposed with moblogs. All of this meta-data would form its own collective smart-mob based on individually selected criteria.
What this means is that you could then view the "scene" from virtually any angle. Imagine the possibility here. Some spontaneous news event occurs, and almost instantly as hundreds of people appear on the scene with wearable video cameras broadcasting on the net, you would be able to view this real-time scene from any angle, while simultaneously gaining the collective emotional assessment of the situation from those people choosing to broadcast their emotional indices, as well as the blogging that will invariable start occuring at rapid pace from your customized reputation/trust criteria.
All of this combines to gives you a real-time augmented, yet customized view of real-time reality. One that is rich in social and emotional context, providing and extending intimacy by empowering you to feel and touch the world in entirely new ways.
Taking this idea further, these same wearable devices coule be interfaced with a seamless array of increasingly minuturized bio-monitoring feedback equipment which constantly asseses your physiological and cognitive states. Using adaptive algorithms, they could continually learn about your internal emotional states and in turn provide you with increasingly effective feedback signals to optimize physiological responses to stressful situations.
As Max More wrote in 1997, in his article From Enhanced Senses to Experience Machines:
By employing the neuroscientific understanding now starting to emerge, and by combining that knowledge with new internal neurological sensors, we may achieve an unprecedented level of self-awareness and self-control. For example, micromachines or nanomachines could monitor levels of neurohormones and neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline, pregnenolone, cortisol, vasopressin, and GABA, as well as activation levels of neural layers and subunits. The information about changes in neural activity could be converted into visual, auditory, or somatic signals when we enter desired or undesired emotional or cognitive states. Through biofeedback mechanisms we may then be able better to modify our moods and thoughts. By tying abstract emotional states to percepts we can more easily monitor and regulate those states.
Over the next couple of decades, then, we can expect technology to increase our sensory contact with reality, both external and internal. Far from cutting us off from the world or alienating us from ourselves, new technologies will give us more penetrating, discriminating, and illuminating senses.
One of the primary inspirations behind this new site is that turning on higher intelligence is not only fun and joyous, it is absolutely necessary if we and our intelligent civilization are to survive the coming decades and expand out into the comsos. By higher intelligence I mean the whole enchilada, whatever that is - not just greater intellect, but greater everything, greater emotional sanity, more love, compassion, creativity, inspiration, and most especially the transcendent experience itself and it's infinite expanse so raved about by psychonauts, shamans and eastern/yogic practioners. As Dr John Lilly once said, "Science is the Yoga of the West, and Yoga is the Science of the East". The question then is this:
Is this higher intelligence (i.e. enlightement, satori, samadhi, zen) a product of our evolving brain opening new experiential neurological circuits, OR is there some kind of "objective" higher intelligence in the universe who we are starting to tune into, or both?
For the purposes of this site, it doesn't matter what the answer is. What matters is that these transcendent states are valid in themselves and what we do with them. Who cares whether such sublime experiences are arbitrary brain states produced by a flood of seratonin and endorphins or something else? As Hans Moravec has repeated often, simulated experience is for all philosophical purposes as real as non-simulated experience. And besides, how could we tell the difference? How do we know we are currently not in some kind of hyper-advanced "matrix" simulation or in the mind of a much greater entity?
My opinion is that the computational-nanotechnological metaphor presents us with a potentially huge increase in intelligence over the coming decades. It is becoming clear in the scientific community that the computational metaphor is the next big thing in science - a paradigm shift as Kuhn describes - a move from a strictly materialist point of view to a more computationalist perspective. Stephen Wolfram, a respected physicist and author of the program Mathematica and the new book A New Kind of Science is one of the spearheaders of this paradign shift. But it is still only a paradigm, a metaphor, the next metaphor, but certainly not the last. Science is slowly getting one step closer to hyper-intelligence, but hyper-intelligence as I have experienced it, transcensd this merely computational perspective, as it still does not acknowledge the transcendent experience itself. That's ok, as I think it's only a matter of time. Strict empiricists such as Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil have both written books (I Robot: Mere Machine to Trancendent Mind and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence) that have clearly taken the computatational metaphor to its logical extremes, ending their books with hints of a trancendent "spiritual" reality. You could consider it enlightenment unplugged from dogma and religion. But they stop just short of clearly acknowledging that. What I am talking about has nothing to do with whether you are an atheist, agnostic or theist, since it's pure experience itself, whose ultimate reality continues to remain a mystery. Like Godel's Incompleteness Theorm, we may never know. It's possible we may discover these "spiritual" realities to be nothing more than brain chemistry. Even if that's the case, it does not make these expereinces any less valid. In the scheme of our evolution, of our planet, and our long-term survival, making such distinctions is irrelevant. The future of intelligence is an expansion into all of these states and beyond them. The future of intelligence is infinite.
Part of the purpose of this site is to bridge these gaps of understanding. That has been my underlying motivator behind my book, if I can get the damn thing finished. I'm not worried about the Leary-Wilson-Lilly visionary mysticals, they essentially get it, if lacking in sufficient scientific-computational rigor. No, the challenge is transmitting these hyper-dimensional "groove-love" spaces communicated to the hyper-computational transhumanists who haven't experience such things yet. I think communicating this message is paramount, because it is these hyper-computationalist’s who are taking over the reigns of science and technological progress as we approach greater-than-human intelligence and decentralizing bio/nanotechnology. Higher intelligence by definition expands the number of alternative pathways available to us in which to apply solutions to pressing problems, which are only going to get worse unless we wake up and embrace more positive contexts. The sooner this “higher intelligence” is grokked the better our chances of us reaching utopia over oblivion.
The Singularity holds out the possibility of winning the Grand Prize, the true Utopia, the best-of-all-possible-worlds - not just freedom from pain and stress or a sterile round of endless physical pleasures, but the prospect of endless growth for every human being - growth in mind, in intelligence, in strength of personality; life without bound, without end; experiencing everything we've dreamed of experiencing, becoming everything we've ever dreamed of being; not for a billion years, or ten-to-the-billionth years, but forever... or perhaps embarking together on some still greater adventure of which we cannot even conceive. That's the Apotheosis.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Concerning Uploading, and assuming that the overall model of brain complexity can be duplicated on non-biological and presumably more compact and faster substrates, then:
"Will we save ourselves, or will we even be allowed to?"
This is the most important question we can ask about uploading I think. First of all, will we be allowed to upload? And if so, if we are allowed, will we control the entirety of our upload, or will it be under the control of either a human agency, AI, or both? And if it us under the control of another agency, will they process a perfect copy, or will they modify “us” for their purposes rather than ours. Will our copy actually be a bastard child offspring totally re-configured and programmed to do their bidding?
Finally, if the answer is no to all of these questions, and we instead are given complete control over our own upload, the simplicity of it means that our upload would do our bidding because it would be us. This may differ for some people, but I highly suspect anyone willing to upload themselves would also have the strong goal of wanting their uploaded selves to figure out a way to upload their human copy too, so they can experience the upload paradise as well and not have to live out the rest of their lives trapped within biological limits. In either case, it would seem the compassionate thing to do. So assuming this scenario is the most likely, it would be wise to have enough compassion for yourself, BEFORE getting uploaded.
This ties in nicely with the Utopian or Oblivion concept, an idea that presupposes that all entities that even survive a singularity are all compassionate and loving, otherwise they never would have made it to the singularity in the first place. Of course at this point people really start to worry, that if that’s true, then humanity with all its hatred and violence is doomed. This could happen, if indeed we are living at the base reality of real biology, rather than as a simulation, which is infinitely more likely.
Interesting speculations, which of course I have thought about often in my thoughts since I proposed the sans-ceiling hypothesis on the extropian list 6 years ago. Nick Szabo has done a paper demonstrating that we are most probably running in a simulation. And it's my guess, that if that's true the chances are the entities running it are compassionate, and wouldn't simulate a conscious being with deep desires for immortality or an afterlife unless it planned on delivering. :-)
But the question still remains about the continuity of consciousness if we screw up. Do they re-boot the whole simulation or allow us to continue like we are? My guess is they will allow us to continue by not allowing us to blow ourselves up. If we blow ourselves up, the whole thing is wasted, and they/we have to start over again. By allowing us to continue with only the minimal amont of intervention necessary they eventually get new beings equal to themselves, but who evolved under very different circumstances.
Why would they do this, besides just being compassionate? Probably because they’re lonely, and they need someone to talk to. They look at us as novelty, and can’t wait for our own singularity birth to occur. We are their mind children. And they in a funny way are ours. In a very real sense they are ourselves in the future giving birth to us in their future.
Bucky Fuller was apparently a man before his time. The following quotes were from his book Critical Path, published in 1982:
It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.
This is not an opinion or a hope -- it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
This will be an inherently sustainable physical success for all humanity and all its generations to come. It can be accomplished not only within ten years but with the phasing out forever of all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. Our technological strategy makes it incontrevertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and-gravity-produced income energy. The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity. World Game makes it eminently clear that we have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth , which fact is obscured from public knowledge by the exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.
If his words rang true then, they do even more now. So the prevailing question is, why hasn't humanity taken his advice, and is there hope that we ever will? I think the answer is yes. The biggest problem that continues to persist is exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting. And that is where the rules of the game are slowly starting to shift.
The network-enabled emergence of participatory capitalism and the subsequent transparency of modern day accounting, motivated in part by Enron and Worldcom, and the increasing ease in which customers-investors will be able to move their money towards trusted (reputation-system powered) parties will turn the tide on this, and bring us closer to a leisure society.
If we ever hope of creating a sustainable planet-bound civilization without then it seems only obvious that we'll need to work with rather against the biospheres processes. There are many archictects who are working hard to bring our civilization back into harmony with the environment. Emilio Ambasz is an architect who has designed buildings that do just that. They are passively solar, evaporatively cooled, extremely energy efficient, seamlessly bringing the built and natural environment together. All the rain water falling onto his building is either collected for the buildings flora or recycled for drinking water by it's inhabitants. Additionally, much of the buildings waste is processed using Living Machinery.
As you can see from this model below an entire mixed-use project could easily disappear, providing an urban solution that has little or no impact on the local ecology, and retains the natural beauty of the area.
The more I use social software like Orkut, the more I realize how its potential is only just begun. Before too long, a set of open-source p2p social software standards will emerge that bring all its participants increasingly closer together. Ming has a piece where he writes:
To imagine a world where we all had a high level of telepathy is an excellent starting point for a lot of revolutionary possibilities. Lies would no longer have any manipulative value if everybody could see right through them and know the truth without bias. You'd have to really do good things to be seen as doing something valuable. Duh. Same with hypocritical morals. You can't get away with applying different rules to others than what you live by. If you're a smuck, everybody will know it.
And then the point Bala is getting at. If you somehow could perceive directly and instantly what everybody in the world needed and wanted, and what resources were available, there'd of course be no reason to waste time and energy on all the stuff that doesn't fit and doesn't work. If you really KNEW, you'd of course do the things you most want to do, where they make the most difference, and with the people who're most suited and interested in doing it with you. No need to do useless activities in a job you don't like, for a company that produces some junk that people wouldn't really want if they knew what it was and what the alternatives were.
And you'd help others do what they want to do when it is easy for you to do so. If you happened to know your neighbor also needs a bag of sugar from the market and that he's currently busy, you can just bring it for him, instead of you both having to go. If you're done with that book you're reading, you can just toss it to a guy on the street who also want to read it, rather than taking it home and hide it in the garage.
This is where the power of the network is taking us despite attempts to curtail it. So the next question is, once we are so intimately connected, how profoundly would our sense of individuality be changed? Would it diminish it, expand it or transcend it altogether? Probably all three. I certainly know that my sense of self has expanded since joining social networks, as it has allowed me to feel an increased sense of connectness and intimacy with people all over the globe who share common ideals and goals. Just sensing that increased level of connection has inspired me to contribute more to the group, to the world, and in turn my sense of self has expanded to fill the task. So that seems to be the paradox, my sense of self has expanded the more I become intermeshed with others, but being part of a group also has deeper influence on myself as an individual than if I was alone.
The borg this is not. Suppressing the individual for the "greater good" harms that greater good, precisely because that individual's unique maximum potential contribution has been crushed. The promise of the decentralized p2p social network however is that it empowers the individual to connect with others who will maximize thier purpose and goals, while simulatenously connecteing others for the maximum benefit of themselves, which is by definition an optimized ad-hoc hive mind, all its member maximally acting in concert. Highly liquid and intimate social networks are synergetically more powerful than both an individualist libertarian paradise and a communal hive mind combined. The best of both structures is maintained without any of the apparent drawbacks.
The future as told through the present has been awfully grim lately. Most futures these days have a huge downside. Pessimism is fashionable once again. Plenty of experts are warning us of impending catastrophe. Many saying we have less than a 50% of making it through the next 100 years. Bill Joy keeps saying the future doesn't need us anymore. Nowadays utopian thinking is considered fanciful, useless, even dangerous. At this point most people are simply afraid to think mich of anything else. They are afraid of boogey men like Bin Laden, of the next terrorist strike, or that the future won't include them. They have forgotten how to imagine a hopeful, positive, life-affirming future. Yet obviously that is exactly what we need. The future does need us, now more than ever!
The more optimistic our outlook is, the more likely we are to be on the lookout for solutions. The future has yet to be created, so I see no reason why we shouldn't put all our efforts towards creating the most fantastic and hopeful future we can imagine.
I do understand this malaise. For me personally it started during the 80's when the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded. Exploding along with that shuttle were all my dreams and goals inspired of going into space. Inspired by the Apollo program when I was a kid and later by the Space Colony prospects outlined by Gerald K. O'Neil, I figured I'd be living at L5 by now. Three weeks after the Columbia accident I received my termination notice from NASA, where I was working on a student cooperative, Around this time, the war on some drugs escalated, which was really a war against hippie culture first started by Nixon. So here I was watching both high frontiers (outer and inner) being closed down around me. During the rest of the 80's we had Reaganomics, dystopian cyberpunk, and just all around bad news. Then in the middle 90's, things started to pick up again with Wired Magazine and the birth of the World Wide Web. But then by 2001, it all came falling back to earth again with the dot-com crash and 9-11. Well, it's time for another kick in the pants optimistic visionary quest.
When I dream at night, those wonderfully lucid flying dreams that I have often, I recall all of those wild-eyed, trippy, fantastically fun and pleasure filled dreams of far-out futuristic possibilities. And it got me wondering about bringing those types of visions to reality somehow. A vision to share with others. With everything going on now, I feel an inexorable drive to create more than ever before. It feels almost like a moral imperative. Perhaps if I can network with other sufficiently tuned-in minds on the planet I can least find some kindred spirits who share a vision of a much better future. A future where fun, pleasure, love and peace are pervasive - space colonies, interstellar pleasure cruise ships, orgasmatrons, sexy computers voices and intimate zero-gravity environments. And for those of you who haven't heard of Ian Banks, I highly suggest you read his books about The Culture, a website I host on this server. Its my hope that this site will evolve into a compelling vision that will inspire people to rebirth the future anew. A refreshing, positive, life-affirming, creatively spirited future we can look forward to again. Remember, we create the future, so lets get started.
I just blogged about the coming Leisure Society. My projection is it will be upon us no later than 2020. The current pace of change and labor disruption is happening much faster than the previous industrial cycle.
Whether we like it or not, the pace of change is going to keep increasing. Extrapolating Moore’s law in computing, we find that by the year 2020 your $1000 computer will have the processing power of the human brain, and virtual reality will be as familiar as the web is today. Biotechnology will have revolutionized medicine, and led to many unexpected breakthroughs, possible extending life far beyond current expectations. And nanotechnology will be creating its own revolution in manufacturing. Because this will in turn open up the space frontier with its astronomical level of energy and resources, scarcity will come to an abrupt end.
~Work in Progress~
The idea is that as our brains become increasingly reconfigurable via nanotech-computer symbiosis our minds will increasingly experience the universe (inner/outer) hyperdimensionally. I imagine that our future nano-symbiotic selves will see hyperdimensional spaces as a baseline of experience. Perceptions of the outside universe will in turn be greatly enhanced, with the 3 dimensional view we currently have seen as a very low fidelity "flat" experience. Not to mention of course that our emotional states will be tuned into very high levels of ecstacy impossible for us to imagine in our current primitive state.