Notes on a Nervous Planet(7)
In the 19th century, the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan announced that technological inventions can lead to whole new eras of humanity. He saw three phases of social evolution – savagery, barbarism and civilisation – with each one leading to the next due to technological leaps forward. This seems a bit dodgy now, I think, because it implies an increasingly questionable moral advancement from ‘savages’ to the ‘civilised’.
Other experts have had different takes.
In the 1960s a Russian alien-hunting astrophysicist named Nikolai Kardashev thought the best way to measure progress was in terms of information. In the beginning there was little more than the information contained in our genes. After that came things like language and writing and books and, ultimately, information technology.
Nowadays, contemporary sociologists and anthropologists pretty much agree that we are heading deep into a post-industrial society, and that change is happening faster than ever.
But how fast?
According to Moore’s Law – named after the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, who forecast it – processing power for computers doubles every few years. This exponential doubling is the reason the small smartphone in your pocket packs way more power than the giant room-sized computers of the 1960s.
But this rapid power growth isn’t just confined to computer chips. It occurs across all kinds of technological things, from bits of stored data to internet bandwidth. It all suggests that technology doesn’t simply progress – its progress speeds up. Progress breeds progress.
Computers now help to build new computers with increasingly small amounts of human involvement. Which means lots of people have started worrying about – or hoping for – the ‘singularity’. This is the stuff of fever dreams and nightmares. The singularity is the point at which artificial intelligence becomes more intelligent than the brainiest human being. And then – depending on your inner optimism-to-pessimism ratio – either we will merge with and advance with this technology, and become immortal and happy cyborgs, or our sentient robots and laptops and toasters will take us over and we will be their pets or slaves or three-course meal.
Who knows?
But we are heading in one of those directions. According to world-renowned computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil the singularity is near. To emphasise this point, he even wrote a bestselling book called, well, The Singularity Is Near.
At the dawn of this century he claimed that ‘we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)’. And Kurzweil isn’t some stoned eccentric, overdosing on sci-fi movies. His predictions have a habit of coming true. For instance, back in 1990 he predicted a computer would beat a chess champion by 1998. People laughed. But then, in 1997, the greatest chess player in the world – Garry Kasparov – lost to IBM’s Deep Blue computer.
And just think what has happened in the first two decades of this century. Think how fast normality has shifted.
The internet has taken over our lives. We have become increasingly attached to ever-cleverer smartphones. Human genomes can be sequenced in their thousands by machines.
Self-service checkouts are the new norm. Self-drive cars have gone from far-out prophecy to such an actual real-world business model that taxi drivers fear for their jobs.
Just think. In the year 2000, no one knew what a selfie was. Google did just about exist but it was a long way from becoming a verb. There was no YouTube, no vlogging, no Wikipedia, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no Skype, no Spotify, no Siri, no Facebook, no bitcoin, no tweeted gifs, no Netflix, no iPads, no ‘lol’ or ‘ICYMI’, no crying-with-laughter emoji, almost no one had sat nav, you generally looked at photographs in albums, and the cloud was only ever a thing which produced rain. Even writing this paragraph I sense how quickly it will date. How in a few years there will be so many embarrassing omissions from that list – so many technological brands and inventions which haven’t quite arrived. Indeed, think about that. Think how shamefully dated technology becomes in a mere matter of years. Think of fax machines, and old mobile phones, and compact discs, and dial-up modems, and Betamax and VHS, and the first e-readers, and GeoCities and the AltaVista search engine.
So, regardless of what you or I think of the prospect of the singularity, there is no doubt that: a) our lives are becoming ever more technological; and b) our technology is changing at ever increasing speeds.
And, just as technology has always been the deepest root of social change, so this dizzying pace of technological change is triggering other changes. We are heading towards many alternate singularities. Many other points of no return. Maybe we have passed some without even noticing.
Ways the world is changing that aren’t entirely good
THE WORLD MAY have progressed fast in some ways, but the speed of change has not made us all very calm. And some changes, particularly those fuelled by technology, have been faster than others. For instance:
– Politics. The polarisation of the political right and left, fuelled in part by our social media echo chambers and gladiatorial combat zones, where compromise and common ground and objective truth seem like ever more outdated concepts. A world where, in the words of American sociologist Sherry Turkle, ‘we expect more from technology and less from each other’. Where we need to share ourselves, simply to be ourselves. There have been good aspects to this change. A lot of good causes – including mental health awareness – have had their profile raised thanks to the viral nature of the internet. But, of course, not everything has been so good. The rise of fake news on social media, of politically malicious Twitter bots, and of massive online privacy breaches, has already shaped and steered our politics in strange and irreversible directions.