…because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…
We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality? How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?
The man… the machine
This is from my first post on what I called the augmented human, back in 2009. And I continue to ask myself what the man-made man will be like.
But this post has a slightly different area of interest. Take a minute, and think about the person you currently are. Now, can you identify when you became this current version? I think it’d be difficult. At best you would give a time range, say 5-7 years ago. I brought up the above post for the continuum it referred to. And the point at which one realises there is a difference from the being now and the being before.
I became aware of something analogous when I was at lunch at Carnival de Goa. A favourite spot in Bangalore for more than a dozen years. They were playing Konkani songs. And I wondered aloud to D, that in the continuum of India’s western coast – say, from Goa to Kerala, there is a massive difference in songs, language, food. Where do these irrevocably change? From Xacuti to Gassi to Pollichathu? 🙂 To continue the thought, when you go from coastline to the hills, when does the landscape shift? The answer, to me, is that it is never one spot, it is a series of gradual changes.
Which brings me back to technology of a different kind. Seth Godin wrote recently about the eroding trust in all sorts of institutions. While he spoke about the importance of trust, I was thinking in a different direction. This erosion in trust has been systematic – humanity used to trust strangers at some point, institutions, neighbours, near and dear. I am not sure even the last is something we can take for granted these days.
Digital began systematically replacing the original middle men (from newspapers to travel agents to small local businesses) with its own players. Social media took it further by supplanting the real world trust, with strangers on the internet with some form of identity. Blockchains are trustless. Quite a continuum no? Are we feeling the change, and is this a good direction?