To begin with: Most of you know by now that my wife is facing a critical health issue, and I'm supporting wherever whatever however I can. I am asking you to please scroll down right now to the bottom of the article, and take action. Then come back up here and keep reading.
What if we've had things the wrong way 'round all this time? What if all our technology is based on incidental phenomena of something we've not discovered yet? I posted an article a short while ago where I posited that technology will become a much different thing for us if we survive the climate emergency.
I guess I've been carried away on the year-end practice of people everywhere to post predictions for the new year, and to do a retrospective on how their last year's predictions fared in the face of events. Here's a guy I really enjoy in the 3D printing technology field, Maker's Muse. Angus was pretty spot-on for 2023 and I'll be interested to see how 2024 gets in line behind his ideas.
Joe Scott on his eponymous channel went for a more ambitious route, predicting the year 2100. It got me thinking. The article I posted just a week or two ago was me trying to imagine a possible future for our technology. I'll stress here that I'm in no way arguing against anything Joe expressed in his video, nor am I trying to one-up what I found to be a really good and thought-provoking video. My wife and I are subscribed to his channels and never miss a video. But I had so many ideas, and memories of ideas, sparked off by that video, that I just had to write them down or burst.
Also, I'm not going to specifically try and predict what our technology is going to be like in the year 2100. Eighty years is a long time in our current state of advancements in making advancements, and also the more quickly things can change, the quicker they can flip-flop and change direction completely. We could finish up in a New Dark Age that makes the old Dark Age look like Barbie World.
And Off We Go.
First, notice that I said "our technology." I've flirted with this idea before. I write for The Zorganite Encumber as well, and this is the article where I mentioned my idea. Clackertech/Aledicnander aren't real tech, obviously.
Incidentally, that "basic Aledicnander Force" thing comes from a story about time travel (I think!) I read 30 - 40 years ago but I can't remember who by and what title nor even if it was a pulp short story or a novel. I was just impressed how everything in the future ran on this "basic Aledicnander Force" and how the protagonist constantly comes up against something everyone else finds almost common beneath mention, and yet so alien to the heroine that it breaks her brain...
I've often considered "our" aspects versus "other" aspects. The old argument that we might a) not recognise another form of intelligent alien life as alive, or b) that other intelligent lifeform may be so totally alien in every aspect that our brains just "slide past" it and refuse to even acknowledge it. I'm 110% sure that the same caveats also apply to technology. When you see whales wearing kelp and dolphins at one particular location in the world (Shark Bay, Western Australia FYI) using sponges as hats to impress the ladies, you have to say - here's what a whale or dolphin can achieve in the way of technology.
Cockatoos in Australia can solve puzzles, crows, monkeys, and apes (among, as it turns out, dozens at least of other species) use tools to solve problems, and some even make those tools by processing a natural resource into a tool. Our forebears knapped flints into knives, made spears and arrows and bows out of wood, sinews, and knapped stone points, that is just a few steps above a crow breaking a branch at a fork to make a hook device, so who's the toolmaker then? Where does opportunistically finding a tool and finding a resource and forming it into a tool lapse into being "technology?"
Anyway - back to that technology.
Each bit of technology we made, increased our knowledge, our ability to interact with the world around us and discover more about it and create more technology based on our new knowledge.
From the first stone tools (of which there is one particular type that was made at all times, by all kinds of hominids, in all parts of the world - and we still have no idea what that particular tool was for) to making a spear might have taken hundreds of thousands of years. From spears improving the game-getting capabilities and thus the nutrition of the hominids and thus more leisure time to think, maybe a shorter time. At each stage, preceding technology made new tech easier to attain.
How Did People Find Things Before The Internet?
I'm going to follow Joe's video here, to a degree.
Marks cut in stone and painted on stone in chalks and ochres and charccoals allowed another technology advance - passing some limited pieces of your knowledge on in absentia, i.e. not having to be there to show it to new people, and being able to pass your knowledge forward in time to future generations.
Clay tablets, various systems of writing, papyrus, leather, printing presses, newspapers, mass-produced books, computers and printers, the Internet. It took millennia for our systems for preserving and passing on informatiom from rock caves to clay tablets, it took considerably less time to the scribes, then less time to Gutenberg, and less time to Mills & Boon. And the Internet, in contrast to the gap between scribes to Encyclopedia Brittanica, took around 25 years to hold more information in text and images than had been produced in all of time leading up to it.
Transport
Joe mentions the future of transport, and says that in eighty years we'll still have EVs and permanent personal vehicles. Let me just say that we've had primitive electric vehicles for 200 years, longer than we've had fossil fuel engined vehicles. But the interest in EVs died off completely and only really began anew with the Tesla Roadster in 2008 - 2011 and the Nissan Leaf in 2010. In the space of twelve years we've gone from one or two custom vehicles made for the bored rich to dozens of car manufacturers making a hundred models and each an improvement on the last to the point where an EV you buy by the end of this year will have batteries that will last for 300,000km and give you a ridiculous 1200km of range between recharges.
Several manufacturers of electric vehicles either were just minor players before they switched to making EVs. BYD was unknown from 1995 until it began making - well, just one EV model really. That would have been about a year, maybe a year and a half ago. They now make several models and one in particular rivals luxury car makers.
What I'm saying is - if EV technology went from clunky POS's to mass-produced and inexpensive luxury sedans and new vehicles that will soon have batteries that will outlast the vehicle in what's really only been eight years, I can't say we'll be driving anything as ancient as electric vehicles in eighty...
Also - the Golden Age Of Physically Permanent Personal Transportation is over. There are between 1.5bn and 2bn cars on the roads today. It's a state of affairs that can't last. Public transportation can only cover some sections of the globe and is inconvenient for many journeys, the Last Mile Problem won't go away, and a whole new way of travelling is on the cards for 2100 as far as I can see.
Space
Same things apply. Space habitats are expensive to build and maintain, in terms of resources - and money. Moon and Mars habitats aren't going to be around any more once they've been tried and the grim reality hits home that we just aren't made for any planet other than Earth.
Our bodies degenerate in low gravities and would degenerate even more in higher gravities, we're totally vulnerable to the hard radiation that our Earth's magnetic field deflects from us. Our biology is based, unsurprisingly, around the particular combination of carbon, oxygen, and other elements that make up the Earth's biosphere.
Look at us. If our fscking with the Earth's life support systems causes just a bit more disturbance with the climate and conditions, we will die. Die as if we'd landed on an alien planet. Because we are really quite fragile, wayyyyy too fragile.
Talk of conquering space is hubris. It's bullshit.
Economics
We've always assigned value to things. Once, it was those stone tools. Then, it was things people made using tools. Or knowledge. Or minerals that were hard to get and were used as tokens. Most recently our governments have taken our currencies off anything that might relate to the real world and assigned an arbitrary value to that fiat currency.
Our economic system is as much a technology as a knife or a book or a mobile phone. It's also as breakable and changeable. Yesterday, our money was based on a stock of gold. Today it's based on the bullshit coming out of politicians' mouths. But tomorrow, it could be based on energy.
It's never been based on real costs. To the planet, to the natural order, to the biosphere, to the other occupants of the planet, the other Earthlings from the smallest organism to the largest oldest tree. THAT'S what we should have valued above all.
But hey - we're here. Let's get the value of our currencies be based on energy. Because... Well, I'll leave that for the next part of this article...
Energy
That brings us to energy. Energy has always cost us dearly, from fire to nuclear power. And when I say "us" I mean the planet. We've moved old sunlight that's in the form of cola from old trees and some animals that consumed the Sun's light and heat, and which was then sequestered into deep earth. We released all that sunlight into today's world. It's costing us dearly now isn't it?
Even now with solar and wind "sustainable" and "renewable" energy, it still costs the planet in resources. But it's better. And if we're very lucky energy will become plentiful enough that we can use it to solve a few of the tough issues that face us right now.
Many problems are solvable if only one has enough energy. Let's hope we beging to think about solving those rather than using energy as a lever to exploit everyone and everything around us.
AI/AGI/SuperAI
There's always this frisson running down our necks and backs when we mention AI. Part of that is due to schlocky sci-fi, some due to all the hype being raised around it. We seem to want AI to become a potent multi-tool, while at the same time being afraid that it'll cut us to shreds. We're told that it's great and finding solutions, and also told that it'll somehow kill us all off.
The truth is that most people just want an AI that can write pornography for us and illustrate it. Or, better yet, that we can give it a robot body and it can become porn. Or cheat for us, write convincing propaganda for us. In order to do that the pressure's on software houses to come up with more and more human-like AI, some real AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) or something "better" than that.
In Truth
Actually - what we need to do is use what we have to solve real-world problems. We need better pharmaceuticals, and a far better understanding of how to provide oursleves with a better diet that doesn't ruin the planet. We need ways to remove CO2 from the atrmosphere. We need ways to restore habitats and ecosystem niches. We need machines and methods to clean up waste and recycle it. We need to restore our planetary life support systems.
We're about to have useful tractable AI and enough energy to power it inexpensively.
What we don't need is a much more powerful AI while we still haven't begun to use what we already have. But that's for part #2.
There's a part 2 to this post, coming as soon as I can manage to get time to write it, proffread it, edit is, and schedule it.
Okay, we're "down here." What's going on? We're facing a medical issue and I'm spending as much time as possible with my wife.
That does mean that I'm not doing as much writing, which means fewer posts, fewer announcements on social media, fewer people's eyes being directed to the blog suite. You can help me out though - share this article, follow the (newspaper icon) link to the News Stand and share that on your social media too. This should bring a few more readers, and with luck, a snowballing effect.
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