Rodney, I gave only the short version. For years I have been ranting about where all this technological revolution is leading. I used SI search to get you some posts, but it's not working.
I have asserted for years that the industrial revolution replaced our muscles and the cyberspace revolution [and other photonic/electronic technologies] is replacing our brains. I maintain that what is happening is bigger than not just the industrial revolution, not just the development of tools back in the stone age and all tools that were subsequently invented, not just the evolution of humans but the whole biological history of Earth. I don't want to overstate the case or I'd make some idle claims that this is bigger than galactic history if not cosmic history.
We are acting as the template for evolution of another life form altogether - a sentient cyberspace which will look on us as we look on our eukaryotic antecedents geol.queensu.ca Interesting, but somewhat irrelevant to our current state. Actually, even that's an understatement because we are still comprised of eukaryotic cells. Cyberspace won't have anything in common with us other than the laws of physics [which cyberspace might just reinvent via some smart alecky quantum tunneling into superstrings or some such trick which is beyond my imagination].
If I really wanted to overstate the case, I'd say we are in the process of inventing God. Which I presume has already been invented long, long ago in another galaxy or even our one and we are just the uterus for the latest birth of another node in the cosmic God thingamy.
I might even say that this could well be the second coming, long promised. I don't think there is a rule that says the second coming has to be in human form. However, I'm not religious, so I'll leave that speculation to second-coming enthusiasts.
Maybe the mysterious dark matter of the universe or the ubiquitous microwave background radiation is not some random Gaussian noise but is really encrypted CDMA radio or other trickiness already suffusing the universe.
Coming back to Earth and earning a crust, just as chimps and other monkeys get by fine with their way of life, with no shortage of jobs, we'll get by fine too as It, the cyberspace God, lifts off from the human realm into It's own ideas on how things should be. A bit like Hal in 2001 A Space Odyssey.
It would ignore us as irrelevant once we've done our job. We could go back to being bungling primates in the jungling way of life, which suits us better than 9 to 5 in a cubicle with a screen in our face, an in-tray and phone hassling us.
Because we are great in 3D physical activity, I think we'll have lots to do in symbiotic harmony with It for a long time yet. Say another 100 years. Maybe longer - good things take time. A smart computer still can't climb a tree. Heck, it can barely recognize a tree - it would confuse a clothesline with a tree. In the visual 3D sphere, with physical movement included and creative responses to physical situations, we are very cool creatures. I wouldn't want to try to build a computer to take over that sort of function. It would look very like us.
So, cutting to the chase, when computers do all the brainwork and not just for US, but for THEM, [which was the point of my previous post] or, more likely, It - [a conglomeration of all computers], we'll do things for which we are better suited. Just as other primates do things suited to them. We'll hang out in the concrete jungle and cook food for each other, play golf, do massage, paint pictures, make movies and do whatever somebody else wants done in exchange for some money so we can get stuff done which we want.
It'll take a long time to get to that idyllic state. Maybe another 50 years or so. Perhaps 100 [things go slower than I like]. In the meantime, India is getting lots of software work and China lots of manufacturing, which is great for we in the wealthy west who buy their services. I can hardly believe how cheap things are.
As their incomes rise, things will balance out and instead of having 100 million people doing good stuff while billions lived lives of rural penury, we'll have 5 billion kilograms of human brain supporting creative things as you described. Then things will really get moving. That's the same process as you described as people moved from rural subsistence life to supporting an ever-increasing technologically creative swarm of people whose food supply is a small part of their budgets.
Lots of people will need to re-deploy to new jobs as their old "puller" jobs <in the 1960's the best "Pullers" operated with a 10 oz. Crucible, a human operator controlled all phases of the operation, and grew a 1" ingot. > become redundant or Indians or Chinese offer to do it cheaper. We'll soon run out of them once their own economies can afford to buy their efforts so we'd better enjoy the cheap services while we can.
Singapore for example, used to be really cheap [so did Hong Kong, Japan and Korea] and New Zealanders could buy things from their lowly paid people for a couple of decades at derisory prices. Now, we work for them, making beds in hotels which they visit as tourists. New Zealand has slid down the economic pile, not so much by us becoming poorer, but by them catching up and passing us.
That's okay, there's nothing wrong with others being richer, except that it probably means we are doing something wrong [which we are].
Anyway, that's a long enough rant.
My job is relatively safe, because I don't have one in the sense you meant. My job is allocating capital - which is allocated to cyberspace technologies [QUALCOMM and RoamAD].
Mqurice |
