Future Man

All of us can look forward to the extinction of our own life, though some like myself dwell on this much more than others. I am one who does what every popular psychologist tells us abjectly not to do. Practically all of them recommend we live for the present only, whereas I find it impossible not to consider the process of past and future worlds. I can’t help being anxious for everything.  I think it’s due to my feeling disoriented unless I pay some attention to past and future.  Looking forward, my best estimate taken from reasonable speculations of others, is that not only will I not be around for a very long time, but that humans as we know them will cease to exist. Within only a few generations the very biological form of humankind is scheduled to change dramatically.

I am not saying that if we keep going as we are now, our species is destined to destroy itself. I am reading that the average large species stays around for 2 million years and humans are close to overrunning out own ecological niche much sooner.  Our population is exploding, 7 billions now, 9 billion by mid-century that guarantees we will overrun food and fresh water resources and pollute our environment and this does not even consider human caused climate change in which rising sea waters will drown our coastal population centers, which in America will most affect New Orleans, New York and Miami. Or war with increasingly lethal weapons of mass destruction threatens to ignite all over the globe fueled either by increased gap between rich and poor, or by the pre-eminence medieval religious hatreds which will annihilate everyone. Giving extremists the wherewithal  is sure to bring an early end to our world. Or mankind will destroy the diversity of life on which we depend leading to our own demise. I don’t believe in any of this negativism and I will tell you why.

These eventualities are possible but highly unlikely in the current setting. That’s because technology seems to be outrunning  Armageddon. Production of real goods that sustain human population, real wealth, is likely to explode in the future as we are progressing very rapidly from factory based goods production to knowledge based productivity. The 3D printer is emblematic of goods production in the future, which is going to be available to everyone everywhere, goods production becoming de-centralized and based on widespread availability of robotic production machines independent of human labor.  Robotic machines run on knowledge based algorithms for production. The model of factory workers producing goods will no longer be applicable. That’s what I have learned from my travels to all the towns in the rust belt of Pennsylvania, once the home of nice towns with large factories, now dismal places with ramshackle houses and pockmarked roads. The same goes for services such as provision of care to the physically and mentally disabled, which will be taken care of robotically. For entertainment, humans using computer tools will simulate environments thus staving off boredom. Indeed boredom seems ever-present enemy of many humans who live unnecessary lives, and look like unkempt long-haired, barely conscious, zombies wearing loose garments shuffling through their dismal streets of once vibrant small towns.  I do see another class of people more on city streets, who seem wider eyed and more engaged and so see developing, another dichotomy which boils down to engagement with life.

As for food, it is destined to come less from plants and animals. Meat will be produced in muscle tissue culture and the slaughtering of animals to make meat, as well as factory based farm model of meat production, will become a thing of the past. The use of real plant food production is likely to be handled similarly by tissue culture. As goods and services slide into cheap and automatic production processes, the ordinary measures of wealth and discrepancies between the rich and poor will disappear. Already the poorest persons in our ghettos, those with little education, and those with maximal education all enjoy ample food resources such as to make obesity the major health problem of our age, yet since the beginning of the twentieth century, as compared twenty-first we have seen a near doubling of life expectancy. Our poorest poor even today have a quality of life in terms of freedom from fear of sudden death from infectious disease, infant mortality, energy consumption, entertainment alternatives, communication devices, freedom from fear of starvation or execution, better than kings of 100 years ago. I am confident humankind will soon be reaching a plateau in which the measure of wealth on the basis of money in one’s name, will largely be obsolete. It is happening already.  Suppose you are a billionaire. How much entertainment and wealth are you consuming personally. You will still have the same needs, as a poor person, stylish clothes, a roof and shelter, nutritious foods, largely fulfulled in just the same way.

The only difference in the near future that I can conceive of between rich and poor is one of level of awareness. In that respect the poor may live as animals being disconnected from knowledge bases and trends in human thought the life of the mind. They might live as your dog does now, with emotions and desires and thoughts, devoid of sophistication. Of course this will largely be a matter of the ability to manipulate objects and symbols and not monetary wealth. OK the rich may yet be able to exhibit some measures of their superiority, in yachts, nice watches and  cars (cars as we know them are quickly going to become a thing of the past), private palaces with views ofuxurious shorelines and mountaintops likely to induce boredom after a very short time. Even these superficial differences are very likely to dissolve within a relatively short timeframe.

As for scarcity such as of fresh water and energy resources, these are not about to become relevant problems. We have newly discovered what some of us realized a long time ago that even fossil fuels, as bad for the environment as they seem, are available in huge supply almost everywhere. We no longer will have to deal with reactionary religious regimes or political systems to redeem energy resources.  People who believe in religion and other superstitions will be free to remain backwards by their own choice or else decide to take part in the greater human endeavor.  But we have a limitless supply of energy resources in nuclear fuel, as we are on the verge of being able to figure better ways of extracting nuclear energy and dealing with nuclear waste. It is simply a matter of solving, soluble problems. We can one day harness renewable sun and wind energy though they represent now the tiniest proportion of energy production. Materials science can cut heat loss of friction attendant to moving from place to place. Energy consumption should be more efficient for larger numbers of people.  Fresh water requirements are solved in one way by the ready availability of cheap energy.  With energy resources a near limitless supply of sea water may be converted to fresh water.  Waste may be reduced by the alchemy of re-use as technology develops to convert one substance into others. And so it goes in a knowledge based technological society problems will arise that are destined to be solved at an ever accelerating pace.

Why should the end of the human species be near, if we are in little danger of using up our resources, exploding the planet or annihilating ourselves? That is because considering the explosion of knowledge and technology,  we being information based biological entities,  are destined to be rapidly outmoded. Already we are far down the path of bonding with machines and devices of human invention.  Legs will not be necessary to get from place to place  especially long and arduous distances, as machines multiply muscular strength and hurl us into the sky.  Even more, memory and cognitive facilities are being taken over by computational devices. Most of us are about screens, computers and knowledge bearing devices. These  threaten to take over thoughts, graphic, musical, linguistic, creative tasks as never before. Devices are now readily at hand in our personal phones and computers, but later they will be implanted inside our bodies, so much so they are likely to dissolve  personal distinctions between the individual and community, the specific personal entity and the environment. Is a memory chip containing intimate personal data held in a hand or placed inside the skull, part of you personally as an individual, or the environment outside the person?  Difficult to tell.

Technology is evolving which binds the Silicon devices to the human form. At the same time we learn to manipulate genetics which controls biological form and behavior. This threatens to change our very physiognomy.   Already vaccines  implant new genes within human cells using viral vectors, to stimulate internal antibody production and thus bypass natural immunity. This is Immuno-prophylaxis by Gene Transfer (IGT). Once genetic manipulation becomes possible and inexpensive,  it enables us to change our own biological form, to minimize food or caloric consumption or to increase muscular and cognitive capacities or for thousands of other reasons. This will end in our biological selves being transformed by design or choice.  The current human biological essence will be altered by cognitive processes. And there is no reason to be confined by the limitations of our brain in its current iteration. The brain will re-form itself to maximize or concentrate cognitive abilities. Futurists have talked about human mental state being uploaded into a Silicon devices so that the spirit (meaning one’s personal record of their life plus desire and experience)  of the individual may survive one’s own lifetime, only in different form. At that time it will be impossible to determine what actually is an individual person vs the collective or if such a concept as an individual should even exist. While some of these projections are at hand, others are far into the future, but few are more than some hundreds of years away which means, looking backwards as well as forward, that although humankind in current form, may have existed for 100,000 years according to anthropologists, we have less than a couple of hundreds of years left to be in our current iteration or form. We are far more likely to end our existence by the explosion inside our heads by that ending up reconstructing ourselves in a different form, than destruction by our own hands.