Oblomov, I can see why the heard of sheople would remind you of that poem. However, I see it as much more positive than that. Robinson Jeffers saw it as an end. A death. On the contrary, the heard of sheople are part of a co-operative, but squabbling, team out to defeat the entropy of the universe.
Actually, that's the whole purpose of the DNA rat race. Sure, it's a dog eat dog world [or big fish eats little fish], but there is no end to it. That's just the driving mechanism propelling DNA to the new paradigm of IT where life makes a quantum leap from DNA to silicon, gallium, photons and the intangible.
There is a peculiar arrogance in humans [and all living things] which gives their own viewpoint a pre-eminent role and leads them to think that they are living on a kind of plateau of life. While that viewpoint is essential to functioning because it really is a shark eat human world or human eat shark world and the individual ego is the core of that battle, it is a false viewpoint.
Like the individual cells in our bodies, we are just part of the whole. Which is not to suggest for an instant that some wacky concept of self-sacrifice is part of the deal. It's a battle of power and every bit of DNA has to fight for survival and be pre-eminent. Winner takes all! There is a kind of dichotomy at foot. The individuals are the reality, but they create the totality.
Meanwhile, while that battle continues, we are not on a plateau of life. On the contrary, we are in the midst of the most tumultuous transition since the beginning of DNA. For all of evolutionary history, humans and their ancestors all the way back to algae and beyond lived within the realm of biological warfare and coping with natural environmental challenges. It seems odd to think we are in this manic time when Groundhog Day seems so tedious. We at times seem to be on an endless treadmill.
Going back 10,000 years, we were chimpoid tribes, squabbling with swords in a bloody, red in tooth and claw battle for territory, survival and alpha-male status. Sure, there are still powerful elements of that, but the tribe is almost global now. It's becoming introspective.
Suddenly, not only have humans become integrated, locked into a totality of globalized, industrialized, governmental stricture, we are creating a transition into new realms of cyberspace, sensing, memory and thinking. [http://www.graviton.com for sensing, ntap.com for memory, Deep Blue for thinking albeit of a simplistic nature]
See Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". wired.com
It really is guesswork as to where we are going. We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way. And fast! This is not punctuated equilibrium where DNA transitions are measured over centuries or millennia or eons. This is decades and even years. Heck, in cyberspace, a month is a long time. Look at what happened between 1990 and Y2K then what happened in the few months since then.
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was jailed for resistance to the trend. He was fighting a war against the machine. Same with Tim McVeigh. Same with Luddites. Same with the Boston Tea Party. Same with the Boxer Rebellion. Same with Pearl Harbour. Same with Hiroshima. It's a fight for power and against the machine being built by others. The battles all seem to lead to increasing integration, industrialization, governmentalisation, globalisation and depersonalisation. The individual becomes nothing more than a silent defiant stare into a video camera from a death chamber in a prison [Tim McVeigh].
We can't go for a walk in a forest these days without Resource Management Act approval, a passport, permit and licence.
I first became acutely aware of the trend one night in Antwerp, Belgium. I went for a drive out around the industrial areas of Zwijndrecht one evening [it was dark]. Industries these days run 7.24 but because they are largely automated, they need few staff. The car parks were largely empty, but the lights were on and the place was humming.
The nuclear power station supplied electricity to the chemical plants and robot lines for car assembly. The plastics factories were humming away. The railways were being loaded and trains were roaring through the night to places across Europe, through the huge Eurotunnel to Britain. It all connected and other than for the few humans to check the dials, people weren't really needed. There were hundreds of factories, all buzzing away, all connected and mutually interdependent. Of course there is even more activity and interconnectedness during the day, but it was the dark and the lights and the lack of people which made the picture so stark.
Because people are the beneficiaries, it's great! We sleep and the machines work all night. In the morning we collect a new car. But there are fewer and fewer of us needed, so we earn money either enhancing that machine or serving the needs of those workers by serving them coffee, building hotels for them [which takes few people these days], etc.
It's great! But it's also somewhat unnerving.
None of us would be without our CDMA phone, car, 747, windows, electricity, computer and a million other accoutrements of modernity. But as we progress, we are increasingly subsumed by and dependent on what we are creating. We are becoming like the mitochondria cells which provide the energy for the whole DNA-based organism.
It sure beats battling for survival as a free-floating mitochondria in an ocean of amoeba and cell-eating bugs.
I quite like it. It's fun! When we blast an incoming comet with the help of IT we'll like it.
Mqurice
PS: Bill Joy extract here, but read the rest too...
< From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things.
Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this day.
I had missed Ray's talk and the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right up where they'd left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn't happen, because the robots couldn't be conscious.
While I had heard such talk before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction. But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray's proven ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots surprised me.
It's easy to get jaded about such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming bookThe Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along this path.
I found myself most troubled by a passage detailing adystopian scenario:
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can't make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
... contd...> |
