<nettime> Fw: Millennium reflections by Dale Amon

["HanS" <Persgal {AT} casema.net>]

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: HanS <Persgal {AT} casema.net>


source http://NowEurope.com



From: Dale Amon <amon {AT} 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
>>------------------------------------------------------



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