The Future Is Now

The pace of science in the fields of nano and biotechnologies, and computing power being increased in exponential terms, is staggering. For majority of world populace, this rapid change mostly occurring in laboratories and that eventually manifests in day to day activities like the spread of Internet from obscurity to widespread visibility. Most of these "miracles" are like "black box", most of us cannot decipher what all these technological marvels are really about or how do they work, as if "We're zombified by progress".

What's the future holding for us? Even scientists whose brain functions perhaps retain more advanced features than the commoners like us, sometimes, cannot comprehend and envision what the future will turn out to be. "Tomorrow's revolutionary technology may be in plain sight, but everyone's eyes, clouded by conventional thinking, just can't detect it. "Even smart people are really pretty incapable of envisioning a situation that's substantially different from what they're in," says Christine Peterson, vice president of Foresight Nanotech Institute".

Ray Kurzweil, who is considered one of the leading futurists of our time observed in his “The Singularity is Near”, describing a point in time “that will represent culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it's simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations.”

In Joel Achenbach's Outlook article published in The Washington Post, the writer ponders about a few not so distant possibilities or scenarios that may be only a few breaths away from humanity's collective consciousness. A few interesting questions and issues were raised, like the following:

"How smart and flexible and rambunctious do we want our computers to be? Let's not mess around with that Matrix business.

What'll happen to society if one day people can stop the aging process? Or if only rich people can stop getting old?"

With every triumphant success of science and technologies, there were and there will be unintended "side effects", for example, global warming is partly came about after the revolutionary inventions of steam engine in 1700s "and all the industrial advances that followed."

Ronald M. Green's article in Outlook describes the following advancements in study of genetics and genetic engineering: "The National Institutes of Health has initiated a quest for the "$1,000 genome," a 10-year program to develop machines that could identify all the genetic letters in anyone's genome at low cost (it took more than $3 billion to sequence the first human genome). With this technology, which some believe may be just four or five years away, we could not only scan an individual's -- or embryo's -- genome, we could also rapidly compare thousands of people and pinpoint those DNA sequences or combinations that underlie the variations that contribute to our biological differences. "

There may be a world just waiting to be emerged where powerful knowledge from todays' experiments will be used and built upon, and many health related issues like obesity and dyslexia will be cured before new baby is borne by tweaking "fetal DNA sequences". A movie was made in late 90s named Gattaca that eerily described similar scenario in a future world "where parents choose their children's traits. Human weakness has been eliminated through genetic engineering, and the few parents who opt for a "natural" conception run the risk of producing offspring -- "invalids" or "degenerates" -- who become members of a despised underclass. Gattaca's world is clean and efficient, but its eugenic obsessions have all but extinguished human love and compassion."

That's only one scenario. A different world may emerge too, which is unlike Gattaca, and where new knowledge and tools will better every human being's life, rich or poor, brown or white, despite the artificially created national origin or whatever belief one may or may not have. In that world that is so much like unaccessible Utopia, discriminations will be things of the past, or collaboration will triumph naked aggressions and violence.

Ray Kurzeweil writes in Outlook "Now that we can model, simulate and reprogram biology just like we can a computer, it will be subject to the law of accelerating returns, a doubling of capability in less than a year. These technologies will be more than a thousand times more capable in a decade, more than a million times more capable in two decades." Regarding the disparity between have and have nots, the ever optimistic Ray Kurzeweil has the following observation: "this exponential progression of information technology will affect our prosperity as well. The World Bank has reported, for example, that poverty in Asia has been cut in half over the past decade due to information technologies and that at current rates it will be cut by another 90 percent over the next decade. That phenomenon will spread around the globe.
Clearly, the transformation of our 21st-century world is under way, and information technology, in all its forms, is helping the future look brighter . . . exponentially."

Read Ronald M. Green's must read article from here. Joel Achenbach's article can be read from here. Ray Kurzweil's article can be read from this link.