AFKAN | 2008-05-29
My concerns are the future of a century from now will seem to be - from the perspective of one of the Elite - damn near a different world.
We have seen what Cultural Eugenics could do in less than forty years, with Singapore.
My concern is two areas will merge - Artificial Intelligence, and Eugenics.
These areas are compounding out in terms of growth of knowledge, and could work together to usher in a phase shift event for Mankind, at the expense of Humanity - homo superior.
Take an extra 10% increase in intelligence, and compound it over several generations.
At a certain point, certain trends become obvious, and Homo Superior will look at us as we look at pets.
I have no doubt the Chinese are working on this full tilt; even Britain has admitted to "chimera" experiments - human/animal engineering.
We of the "Limits to Growth" crowd see what they will see - there is little to no need for about ninety percent of humanity.
It will make "Brave New World" seem like Paradise Island.
If I had my schooling to do over, I would have skipped the business courses, and taken a ton of biology, because the future will be shaped by Living Systems.
And not all of them will be "human," as we know it.
Let me repeat this - ninety percent of humanity AS WE KNOW IT will be net negatives, in Malthusian terms.
I am brutally determined that MY nephews, and THEIR Posterity, will be on the Winning Team.
By. Any. Means. Necessary.
Excellent Piece!
"A different WORLD." Totally different TRENDS!
In an earlier piece u are talking about will happen faster than you think. You bring down one of the Absolute Inevitables of the Future, population growth.
In an earlier piece I mentioned the monumental importance of the end of the Mach 2.2 Supersonic Transport, the STT. It just didn't catch on and died with a whimper, whereas every other major jump in civilian transportation speed had become part of the landscape. I seemed to be only one who noticed it was a hell of change when the latest Big Jump died.
Please note I did NOT predict an inevitable future in which we moved steadily back to stagecoaches I just noted that one of our most rigid Inevitables went away. On you point about populating, I remember a TV news item a generation ago when India decided to reduce her population explosion by using vasectomies.
It showed one Indian lying down in the train section to get a vasectomy. What was the Great Cultural Revolution they used to get him to do it? They gave him a small portable radio.
Maybe it is because I am so familiar with the third world, but I was always amused by the Great Sociologists and their Sophisticated Cultural Explanations of the huge families in the third world. You know, the Manhood by lots of Children stuff. Manhood by Large Families, to the extent it was true, was true because they were incapable of having anything BUT large families.
If you think whites traded off larger families for big houses and new cars and college educations, you ain't seen nothing until you see transistor radios at work in the third world.
On Planet Earth, population GROWTH – not population yet -- is dropping like a rock. That was my POINT about the future in the SST article. But commenters obsessed on the example instead of the LESSON.
"Ideology is dying, genetics is being born." Simmons's summation is the sort of thing we should be drawing out of these discussions of the future. AFKAN's summary of the changeover from quantity to quality is this sort of lesson. We should be looking at TRENDS, not Popular Science-type "the latest thing" talk.