HanS on Sat, 8 Jan 2000 01:11:54 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Fw: Millennium reflections by Dale Amon |
-----Oorspronkelijk bericht----- Van: HanS <Persgal@casema.net> source http://NowEurope.com From: Dale Amon <amon@vnl.com> Subject: Reflections on the Third Millenium Whether this is the "true" start of the Millenium or not is really rather meaningless. We have rolled over the odometer and with it we have sealed yesterday into a box labeled Second Millenium. It's the human cognitive perceptions which matter, and which mean we are today starting with a very large clean slate upon which to write the future. Our civilization is time based and individuals within it mentally package events based on the calendar. We put yesterday behind us, and then we package our yesterday's into weeks, months and years; perhaps once in an average lifetime we get to drop all of those years into a century sized box... and yesterday we packaged 10 centuries into the Second Millenium Box and placed it on the shelf of human history. There is another factor that affects human perception and cognition. A form of Regression to the Mean. In an historical context it means that as we get more distant from a box in time, our perceptions of the contents of the entire box tends towards the *average* of that box. Thus, as we distance ourselves from the Second Millenium, it will not be a time of technology and spaceships. Apollo, Columbus and the Crusades are now shelved together, but in the minds of future school children our just past millenium will be more one of sword wielding armoured men on horseback hacking away at each other, perhaps mixed up with some confusion about biplanes, radio and such. The Second Millenium was not about science and technology per se. It was the millenium that led to the germinationof those ideas at its' very end, on the doorstep to the Millenium in which they will fully flower. This ability to box things gives us a certain freedom from the past as well. It allows us a psychological new beginning, one we can face with a semblance of a state of innocence and hope. It is somewhat of a comfort to have the excesses of the Inquisition, WWII, the Central State Communism of Stalin, the massacres of Hitler and Pol Pot, slavery and colonialism safely behind us, or at least sufficiently so that they do not a priori enter into the ethos of this blank slate called the Third Millenium. The slate may be blank, but it does have initial conditions that will define its' first few centuries and certainly affect if not define its' mean when looked upon from the 4th Millenium. There can be little doubt that technology defines this new era. We have: * Small companies building spaceships for tourist travel. They should be flying within the decade. * Regular human access to low Earth orbit with an aging space station (MIR) still flying and a new and much larger space station under construction. Complete with a large *privately funded* module with space for rent. * An economy that is not only global, but extends all the way to Geosynchronous Earth orbit. * An increasingly high profile of calls for settling the moon and Mars that few would percieve not being reality before this first century of the millenium is over. * The knowledge that many, many stars have planets and we will soon be able to see the Oxygen marker that screams "LIFE HERE!" to the rest of the Universe. We have already seen photons from a planet around another star. * We have photographically surveyed nearly every major and many minor bodies in our own solar system. * Physics is edging towards a grand unification theory and Quantum Mechanical magic is edging from theory to technology. * Genomes of species, including our own are objects to be traded on CDROM's. With the map comes the ability to explore and to manipulate it at will. * Average lifespans are increasing. The idea of a massive extension of lifespan and control of aging via genetic tools no longer has a giggle factor. * Hard to predict protein folding will soon fall to a supercomputer. With that ability comes the ability to design antibodies and antibiotics and enzymes and catalysts from scratch. It also removes one of the most serious technological hurdles percieved for nanotechnology. * We have mapped out the entire development of a a nematode worm, C. Elegans, from one cell to a full grown worm. With this plus the above, we have the entire set of tools for the creation of life by design. * We are on the edge of building from the bottom up. The pace is accelerating in the invention of tools for direct manipulation of molecules and atoms. * The language barriers of Babel are already under serious attack. Real time language translation is a reality and will improve and become common place. * The power of computers is increasing so fast that we may get strong Artificial Intelligence by brute force emulation of the human mind if by no other means. * The detailed understanding of how the living human brain works in real time is coming on at a breathtaking pace due to the vast improvements in CAT Scan technology. Even the edges of the question of what consciousness means is under attack with the new instrumentation. * Whether or not we have strong Artificial Intelligence, we enter the millenium with most of the elements of useable and useful mobile robots near to solution. * The Malthusian population bomb has mostly defused as nation after nation around the world has climbed the S curve from high death/high birth to low death/low birth. We thus enter the millenium with a population that is still growing and causing massive environmental problems as a side-effect... but with the knowledge that the entire world is likely to see the start of a drastically *falling* population (ala Western Europe) by the end of this first century. * There are already the beginnings of a slow rise in sea level that will be disastrous for some nations. * It is likely there will be some level of human induced climate change. We will adapt at some unpredicatable. * There will be a continuing loss of species as human population rises towards its peak. * Cloning technology and genetics are on the edge of allowing us to bring back a previously extinct species. While Jurassic Park may not be in the offing, the return of the Mammoth *might* be. If such is demonstrable, we will have the tools to save species on disk until humanity's numbers start falling. * The Internet. >I've left this until last because it is possibly the most explosive change of the lot and is the one that will aide and abet many of the above and change society into something that will be unrecognizable to Second Millenium minds. Precisely what those changes are is almost certainly beyond detailed prediction. The Second Millenium opened with some of the elements of the birth of the Nation State in place, and in many ways the millenium is the story of the growth of that entity and the battle between it and its competitors. *This* Millenium is opening with the germs of an equally major re-thinking of how humans organize themselves. States are hierachical. They work well in a reality that has relatively slow information flows, and in which the collection and particularly the collation and analysis of information is very costly. In such a world information moves vertically. It is analyzed on the way up and then distributed from the top downwards. The last century of the previous millenium took this to its logical extreme with "mass media". Whether in service to the Nazi state or to a less overt unspoken desire to keep the status quo in "free" states, mass media was the tool of thought control that made that century everything that it was. But communications technologies have been eroding that ability to control and now as the internet goes into full flower over the next few decades, it is likely to undermine the very concept of the state and many of the concepts built around it. The recent results of the eToy vs eToys battle may perhaps be a foretaste of what is to come in a world where information flow is *horizontal*. Information is power, and if the flow is horizontal, then the *power* will also be horizontal. I cannot predict where this will lead. I can predict certain events as likely, but I cannot describe the new society. For example, I can safely say that court ruling around the world that are made in the interests of those in the current power structure will be effectively overturned in practice. What use would it be to eToys for example, to win its court case against eToy if public opinion then bankrupted it? What good will it do IFIP to win a court case in Denmark or elsewhere if the most vibrant part of the music industry is caused to move into the GPL? Even if they win, they might find their product turn to dust in their hands. High speed horizontal flows of information imply a very different way of organizing human affairs. Events have *already* accelerated beyond the fastest possible pace at which the hierarchical structures of state bureaucracies can adapt. And the pace is still heating up. My own guess is that we are headed for a human society based on the self organizing principles of mathematical chaos. The numbers of human beings on earth are so large now that it is entirely possible the system could be a stable one. I would like to imagine this has some libertarian overtones to it, but I simply do not know what the instantaneous interaction of the individual decisions of 10 billion people will bring into being. Whatever it is, it will certainly be interesting. >>------------------------------------------------------ >>Use Linux: A computer Dale Amon, CEO/MD >>is a terrible thing Village Networking Ltd >>to waste. Belfast, Northern Ireland >>------------------------------------------------------ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net