Overview:

Any book that analyzes change can mislead its reader into thinking that change fills our entire history. Instead, the whole point of all our groups, from the family to the nation, is to preserve themselves—to deter change, not aid it. Most of our customs, rituals, laws, and the like, are all about preserving structure, or, at the worst, managing any unavoidable change. For most of our history most of our changes have been steady, but they’ve also been small. Only extremely recently has that changed, putting us into an unstable state. As our changes mount in the future we’re likely to become more unstable. And that’s something we’re not yet prepared for. It may even be something that we can’t ever be prepared for.

No one knows what our near future will be, but nowadays three types of guesses are popular. One is that we’ll starve to death, run out of resources, drown in our garbage, get destroyed by climate change, and so on. Another is that we’ll continue more or less as today, except that we’ll have shinier toys. Yet another is that everything will slowly get better and better until everything will be rosy for everyone. Each of those near futures seem possible, but in the swarm view, none seem plausible. Our near future will likely be much stranger than that. We’re not headed up or down some ladder. We’re headed sideways. And we’re headed there fast.

Golgotha

His name is Henry M., and he’s confused. He lives his life from hour to hour, sometimes from minute to minute, with no memory of what came before. He’s just been talking to you for the last 15 minutes and he seems completely normal. But a door just slammed behind him and as he turns toward the noise then turns back he’s startled that you’re there. His life has no context. He survives by keeping a diary. In it he notes everything of importance that just happened to him—who you are, where he is, whether he just had lunch. Each night he places it where his future self will see it the next morning. His diary is his offline memory.

In August 1953 he was 27 years old and living in Hartford, Connecticut. He was as normal as anyone else, but his epilepsy was killing him. His doctors had no idea how to cure it so they tried experimental brain surgery. A surgeon scooped out a fist-sized chunk of his brain, taking his hippocampus, his amygdala, and parts of both temporal lobes. After it, he could no longer store new long-term memories. His memory system became like a broken video recorder that could still play old vids but couldn’t record new ones.

After surgery his memory system could retain only at most the last ten minutes, so he lives each day in a perpetual present. “Right now, I’m wondering,” he once said, “have I done or said anything amiss? You see, at this moment everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before? That’s what worries me. It’s like waking from a dream.” A doctor who’s worked with him since the 1970s is today still a stranger. Mirrors shock him—they show him an old man. Each time he learns that his mother is dead, he feels the grief anew—and ten minutes later he forgets it again. Today, yesterday, every day, he’s still living the first few minutes of that first day after surgery. He’s still 27, Eisenhower is still president, a loaf of bread still costs 16 cents. For him, that day the earth stood still. It hasn’t moved since.

His personality, intelligence, and pre-surgery memories are intact, but he’s lost a big part of what it means to be human. His lost hippocampus had encoded and decoded his memories. It had also sent and fetched them to and from the rest of his brain. So he’s memoryless without it. Our brain is made up of many such parts, so many that we don’t even know how many yet. Take a brain cell out of its skull and it just sits there like a tiny wet noodle, then it quickly dies. Our neocortex has about 20 billion such cells, but what makes them into a brain isn’t just their vast number, but their diversity and dense linkage. That dense diversity gives them their power. Their network isn’t something we can understand the way we can understand a bicycle, but one day, perhaps not many decades from now, we’ll likely build one.

Today a supercomputer can simulate about 10,000 baby rat neurons. Those neurons are about the same as ours, so about 2 million such machines might be able to mimic our neocortex. Today, the first one costs about $100 million U.S. Now obviously you don’t have that kind of money. If you did, you wouldn’t be reading this; you’d be out shopping for a new vacation home—maybe Bermuda. However, if computers continue improving at present rates, in 20 years $100 million worth of computers would turn into $100 worth of computers. In another 20 years it would fall a further million-fold. So within about 40 years we might have $200 machines at least as complex as our brains. Suppose that happens. What’ll happen next?

Before answering that question you need to know a few more things. The first is that we don’t know how much brain it takes to make a person. Take the case of Vicki P. As with Henry M., she had intractable epilepsy. In her case, doctors sliced her brain in two, a left brain and a right brain. After surgery she noticed herself behaving oddly. Her left hand would grab things she didn’t intend to grab. When she’d get dressed, she’d find herself putting on two pairs of shorts, one on top of the other. Here’s what happened: the left half of our brain controls the right side of our body; the right half controls the left side of our body. Normally, only one of our half-brains can speak, but that doesn’t matter because the halves are linked, so both know what the other is up to. But in split-brain patients like Vicki, they’re separated. Neither brain has any idea what the other is up to—or even that it exists. Vicki is even more unusual in that both her brains can speak. Both think, and say, that they’re Vicki. So when she says that her left arm is doing something ‘she’ doesn’t intend, we know that her left brain is talking. It would be more accurate for her to say that her left brain is presently controlling her vocal chords and it has no idea why the body it inhabits is moving its left arm—because the decision came from the right brain, which the left brain is unaware of. Before her brain was split she was one person. Now she’s two.

So half a brain can be enough for the rest of us to call the being with that brain a human being. But a few of us have even less brain matter. In 2004, a 44-year-old man checked into a hospital in Marseilles. He complained of weakness in his left leg. After brain scans, doctors found the source of the problem: most of his brain was missing. He was a largely untreated hydrocephalic. From birth, excess fluid had accumulated in his skull, squeezing his brain matter to the sides. But it happened slowly enough for his brain to adapt to the reduced space. So he lived without impairment as a married civil servant with two children and an IQ of 75. Thus, the question of how many neurons it takes to make a human brain is like the question of how many termites it takes to make a termite colony. So now that we’re beginning to run large neural networks we don’t know how big a network we’ll do before it begins to seem human-like.

Next you need to know that today’s high-end brain imagers, which can see inside the brain as it works, are doubling in scan resolution every year. We can already see down to the level of individual nerve clusters. We can also sense nerve activity directly by monitoring the brain’s electrical field. And we can activate single neural bundles with high-precision neural probes. We’ve also already built silicon neurons. In short, we can see nerve bundles, sense their activity, stimulate them, and even mimic them. We’ve already read live rat thoughts for simple yes or no decisions. We can also now tell what people are looking at, although we can’t yet read their thoughts about it. And we can implant devices into brains to replace lost function. As a result, in rich countries and in special cases, those of us who’re paralyzed can already drive our wheelchairs with brain-reading helmets. With chips implanted into our muscles, some of us can get out of our wheelchairs and walk again, although still clumsily. Some of us have regained use of our hands with brain implants. Implants also let some of us with chronic pain control it. As epileptics, some of us can now control our seizures. Some of those of us who’re blind can now see well enough to drive (still only in safe conditions though). Most of us who’re deaf can hear, if we choose to. We’ve also mated a silicon neuron with 14 natural neurons that control a lobster’s stomach. The lobster nerves can’t tell the difference.

Finally, you need to know that it needn’t take a lot of neurons to do impressive things. For example, 25,000 rat neurons are enough to fly an F-22 Raptor fighter plane. We’ve wired up monkey brains to control robot arms halfway across a continent. We’ve put fish brains into robots, mated rat nerves to silicon chips, and simulated a small part of a cat’s brain in a computer. One supercomputer now even models a whole mouse cortex. It’s crude, and it’s also not real time—it takes six seconds to produce one second of mousy thought—but one day we may have brain aids that compensate for problems like dyslexia or poor memory. Then we may add abilities, the same way we first had spectacles to correct vision then telescopes to increase it. Once you can upgrade your senses cheaply and without surgery, enhancements may become common, then irreplaceable. Perhaps boring academics will call it ‘ensagement,’ but maybe everyone else will call it ‘brain hacking’ or ‘chipping.’ A chipped person would then be someone with a chip in their head.

If we could one day chip senses and motor skills, why not memories and perhaps even thoughts? We’ve already built a synthetic hippocampus. It does part of what Henry M.’s mutilated brain no longer can. It’s being tested in rats now. With computers to help us, we’re beginning to figure out how our brains are wired. Maybe we’ll finally be able to stop those annoying jingles from running through our heads.

So far, most of our new mental tools are only experiments, but the future is knocking. As we learn how to build more bits of brains, even without understanding how they work, we’re making the tools that’ll one day enhance the brain. For example, if you had a synthetic hippocampus helping you store new memories, you’d have an upgradeable brain. You might alter it to add richer memories, or help retrieve old memories, or backup your memories. Once we can store memories outside the brain, we might pool them, analyze them, rewrite them. If other brains could relive them, or at least train themselves to understand them, we might even buy and sell them. Some of our formal education might one day be replaced by simply uploading portions of other people’s brains.

But that’s nothing. If you can sell your raw memories, a whole new entertainment industry arises, vaster by far than today’s movie industry. Once you have a suitable implant, you might also remotely control any machine, feel a lover’s touch halfway around the world, or network your powered clothing to display your ongoing brain states for parties. Further, for you, augmented realities become just that—realities. Any fantasy at all could become as real as real can get. For you, the world would become an amusement park. Probably though, instead of education or remote office meetings or industrial control, the first commercial application of such mental devices will be as sex aids. Maybe we’ll start sharing a partner’s sensorium during sex. No attachments necessary; batteries not included. Someone is also sure to record a chipped person dying, then sell the recording.

At this point you may be telling yourself that all that is pure science fiction. True. Maybe you’re also thinking that even if we might one day live with the chipped it’ll be centuries from now. True? Perhaps you’re thinking that the brain is so complex that it’ll take us centuries before we can mess with it safely. Or maybe you’re thinking that our medical safeguards in many rich countries will slow things down. Today it takes at least a decade to test anything intended for human use, and that’s even after it’s been through non-human trials. Further, any deep changes to the human condition will break taboos we don’t yet even know we have. So most tests will be done quietly—at least at first. Knowledge cross-pollination will be low—at least at first.

If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re right. There are many potential barriers to brain implants becoming widespread anytime soon. But keep an eye on our computers’ rate of improvement. We’re also learning a lot now that we can watch the brain as it does its tricks. If our tools keep speeding up, our ability to analyze complex networks and design new ones might double in 20 years (just a guess). If so, it might double again in ten more. Then double again in five more, and so on. Thirty years from now we’ll likely grow braver and braver. Think your life is confusing now? Wait until you have to worry whether your new facial tic is due to a buggy implant.

Twenty-three centuries ago Aristotle thought that our minds lived in our hearts. Plato disagreed. Neither could prove anything and the brain remained a mystery—until just recently. Although nearly everything that happens alters our brain chemistry (visual cues, drugs, diet, a crowbar to the head), until recently we had no direct way to see the neural effects. We also had no way to alter them precisely. So the brain remained a black box. Today though that box is growing more and more transparent as our knowledge of it grows. Some day it may be made of glass. We can already see quite subtle brain state differences—for instance, the difference between our experience of getting a joke from that of finding it funny.

As our mental tools get cheaper, they might first enter our psychiatric wards or jails. Prison wardens, pleading rising costs, may press for reprogramming violent offenders. But if such technology exists in our jails it won’t stay there. How long might it be before we try to change brains that we deem ‘pre-criminal’? Or before we brainscan anyone before accepting them as jurors? How about before trying them? Before hiring them? Before they vote? Before they breed? Or before we scan each other as possible mates? ‘What’s your sign?’ might gain a whole new meaning then. And how long might it be before we scan kids when advising them about possible careers? Many parents may even call for ways to give their kids better recall, focus, analytic skill. Some parents will also wish to suppress their children’s moodiness, surliness, and various forms of more adult naughtiness.

As our new tools cheapen and spread we’ll find more and more uses for them. For example, one day our ultrarich might even cheat death, after a fashion, by endlessly copying snapshots of their brains to more permanent media. But as our new options expand, so would our new questions. Get a heart transplant and you remain you, but how much of your brain do you upgrade before there’s no line between you and the machine? How much do you chip your brain before there’s more than one you in there? When your body dies, do we shut down the still functioning synthetic of you as well? Is a copy of your brain you? Does it have property rights? Does it have human rights? Can someone destroy it and just pay a fine, as if it were a car or a horse? And if it arranges to kill someone, is it murder, or death by misadventure?

Sometime in our future, some of us may have total recall, untiring focus, expanded senses. Pain dismissal, no need for sleep, artificial telepathy, remote control of machines, all seem possible. Some of us might even carry copies of our brains in our pockets. What would we be when we can say we lost our mind, and mean it literally?

And what about the bonds between us—even our very richest and very poorest? The definition of ‘human being’ depends on many basic traits that we all share—and that we’ve all shared for millennia. We’ve never had to question it before because we’ve never been able to change it before. But soon perhaps even changing our personalities on a whim might become possible. Beings who can edit their own minds may look like us, but they won’t be even remotely human. In the past, we’ve been inspired to do more and to be more by those who showed us the limits of the possible. Our great dancers, fighters, scientists, humanitarians, they all ennobled us. They showed us what we could be. But to become more took discipline. It took effort. It took passion. What might it be like when it only takes money?

Some of our future chipped might even gain direct control over their passions. That particular technology, if it’s even possible, would make today’s psychoactive drugs look like the blunt tools they are. Even today, using electromagnetic helmets, and without surgery, one neuropsychologist claims to be able to stimulate feelings of déjà vu, the urge to laugh, and the numinous feeling of a religious experience. If one day some of us can stimulate feelings of sympathy, terror, joy, even love, will our feelings lose their power to move us? Will we be any happier when rapture is on tap, like water from a faucet? Will we ever leave the house? Or bother to eat? Will we come to think of each other as just crude and unreliable ways to generate in us the feelings we desire? And when the transcendent feeling of being in the presence of the sacred is something we can mix with other feelings, like triumph or amazement, the same way we today mix chocolate and pistachio to make new ice cream flavors, will anything at all matter to us?

What might it be like when the unenhanced share the earth with beings who view them as we today view a fish in a bucket of water? What will link our future groups? For the chipped of that time, the rest of us might as well be deaf, dumb, blind, memoryless, paralyzed—and stupid. What can you ever be to someone who thinks of you as you think of a broken watch? Can you even be a pet? Or are you too much like a spider or a beetle even for that? Perhaps such beings might pity the rest of us. But if they also have programmable emotions, why wouldn’t they simply turn off their pity if it becomes inconvenient? What shall we be when we can turn on this and turn off that, feel whatever we want to feel, imagine whatever we want to imagine, become whatever we want to become?

Last century we exposed the levers of the cell, and many things changed, not just our medicine. For example, our urbanization patterns also changed, as did many other things we couldn’t possibly have predicted. Now that we’re beginning to expose the levers of the brain, everything will change. Some of us may exploit others in ways unthinkable through all our millennia of cruelties. Others of us may so change ourselves that we won’t really be human in any real sense anymore. And if everything about our brain becomes explicable (or at least duplicable), perhaps even down to the quantum level, none of us, chipped or not, would have any philosophical place to stand anymore. Everything about us—our religions, our beliefs, our very existence—could change. The day the brain turns to glass may be the day that our species as we today understand it ends and many of us become the world’s new Henry M.’s.

‘Golgotha’ is a Greek word for an Aramaic word meaning ‘the skull.’ Near Jerusalem it one day also became the name for the place of execution, and, for some of us, much later, a place of rebirth. A time of death and rebirth—that seems to be where we’re headed. For our species, the skull is where everything happens. For all our existence as a species we’ve used education to modify the brain slowly and indirectly. The results are all around us. The brain is where we make information real. It’s where we lever tiny neural changes into huge changes in the world around us. Now that we’re beginning to modify it directly, we’re beginning to reshape ourselves. Change the brain and you change the world. Bored with this planet? Don’t worry, in a few decades it may be a whole other planet.

The Colossal Machine

Fiddling with the brain seems a likely next step for us but it would be a much larger change than simply giving some of us new mental power. Once we understand the brain enough to simulate it we might build copies. Those copies might then go into our artifacts. So our tools would change, then so would our groups. But how exactly they might change is more of a mystery. Take robots. Given what’s happening on today’s battlefields, mobile robots will likely be good enough and cheap enough to work alongside us in a couple decades. But many of them might still be very dear compared to hiring a person, especially in our poorest countries. How the economics of that plays out in different labor markets is hard to predict. Lawn mowing is one thing, coal mining is another.

Nor is money the only variable. One of those new mobile robots will be driverless vehicles. Today we’re within maybe a decade of a costly but functional military one. As it grows cheaper it’ll spread out of the military. Then our rich will buy it, if only as yet another status symbol. It might take another decade for it to be cheap enough for widespread use, but one day it will be. However, its use on unmodified roads is likely to slow once one causes one of us to die. Our future robots might well be a million times safer drivers than we are, but we have many mechanisms to deal with driver-caused deaths, and none yet for driverless-caused deaths (outside of factories). It’s hard to know how much the resulting lawsuits might damage the first few companies making such vehicles, and what chilling effect that might have on the whole field.

Or take automated luggage. Before driverless cars are widespread, we’ll probably have powered luggage. Why lug your stuff around when it could lug itself as well as a dog? But such a change would need more than laziness plus wealth to succeed. Adding wheels or legs will add weight. Both the physics and the economics of powered flight make airline luggage a second-class citizen. Aerospace engineers are unlikely to alter already tight design tradeoffs unless nearly all passengers already have self-propelled luggage. Even then, cost accountants are unlikely to approve new outlays right away. Jets are costly pieces of capital equipment with 20-year replacement schedules. And even for travelers on less constrained transports like buses, trains, and ships, making luggage doglike will at least make it more expensive. So will hardening it against theft. Plus, cheaper luggage transporters already exist—they’re called porters. Which solution wins that competition will depend not simply on technology, money, and the law, but also on our reactions to strikes and pickets. On the other hand, all those constraints make it sound like walking luggage will never happen. Not so. Once one new piece of technology succeeds, the network balance between our various inertial forces changes so that technologies related to it become more likely to succeed next. Driverless cars and self-toting luggage will go together.

Then there’s technology spillover. Develop a tool for one use, and just like that, other uses suddenly become clear. Armed robots, from the size of jets to the size of wheelchairs, are already in use today in military transport, surveillance, and weapons delivery. How long before we use cheaper ones for home defence? How long after that before an armed home kills one of us by mistake? How long until one of those victims is a child? Further, even without advanced robotics, new cars already record what they’re doing. How long will it be before the law says that they have to tell the police what they’re doing as they do it? Or how long before your boss can listen in? How long before your house has to do the same? Then your shoes and clothes? What’ll it be like when your own stuff spies on you? The same tech could also turn all new guns into self-spies—telling officials where they are and what they’re shooting at. It’s even harder to guess how quickly mobile robots might cheapen further, and how much they might cheapen. The point is that growing our overall brainpower isn’t a simple linear change, like growing our toilet paper supply. As our reaction rates grow more and more non-linear, they might well go hyperbolic in at least some areas. And it’s their speed that counts.

It’s hard for us to see just how many things could change in our near future because our popular views of ourselves are so very wrong. Today we rarely see how densely linked our swarm already is. Take an extreme case, just to illustrate the point. Suppose a genie gave us a matter copier. It copies anything we feed into it, including another copier. Great! We could each have anything we want. No more famine. The price of things like desalination plants would fall so no more babies dead from water-borne disease. No more poverty. No more difference between rich and poor countries. But that’s only what would happen on Star Trek. In reality, as prices tumble, so would wages and employment. As both fall, how many of us would have even the little money we’d still need to get those so much cheaper things? Besides, what would money be in a world where we can copy anything? If you’re a doctor in such a world, would you go to work? How about if you’re a toilet cleaner? An undertaker? A fire fighter? A prostitute? If the price of every physical thing falls, who takes out the garbage? With nothing material to induce us to serve each other, conflict might actually rise. Chaos surely would. Policing is a service too. Further, as employment changes, what would become of cities? As cities disperse, what would become of the pension and insurance funds invested in their real estate? As those funds evaporate, what would become of the stock markets they fuel? As markets dry up, what would become of banks and life savings? As savings vanish, what would become of marriage and child-rearing? Everything’s linked.

While a cheap matter copier is a long way into our future, a self-copying robot may not be. We don’t have any today, and from what we’ve already learned about the intricacies of living systems, building the first one won’t be easy. But we’ve already made a machine that can make many of its own parts (although it can’t yet assemble them to make a copy of itself). So it’s possible that one day, with enough smarts, we might make a robot that could copy itself. If such a thing comes to be, Mickey’s scene from Disney’s Fantasia becomes real, except that when you don the sorcerer’s hat you can not only make a broom that carries water, you can also make new sorcerer’s hats.

Then there’s all the things we’re learning today about brains. Some of our most expensive robots might well one day carry in themselves much of what we learn about how to guide a body through the world. What might it be like if some of them grow so complex that for us they stop being a ‘what’ and become more like a ‘who’?

Even when we can see what links to what, and what new tech might be on the way, and even when it might get here, we can’t always tell how we’ll react. For example, In 1998 in various Israeli day-cares, some parents were late picking up their kids, causing teachers to have to wait. The day-cares imposed a small late fee, expecting it to decrease lateness. Instead, lateness doubled. Before the fee, parents had no way to gauge the cost of their lateness, so their guilt limited it. After the fee, they felt comfortable buying time at the expense of the teachers. Now they knew that time’s price. The day-cares then abolished the fee, expecting parents to go back to being mostly on time. They didn’t. The fee had a stigmergic effect. Once it was lifted, parents knew that being late cost little, and now they didn’t even have to pay that. Even when we can tell how we might first react to a change, we still can’t tell how we’ll react over the long run. We aren’t smart enough. For instance, we drive fast in cars and have accidents. So we invent new safety features. Some make us feel safer at speed. So we drive even faster—and kill at least as many as before. In 1924, in the United States, traffic accidents there killed 143 of us per million. In 2004, they killed 145 per million. In non-linear networks it’s never ceteris paribus. It’s always cetera desunt. Finally, even if we could tell exactly how we’ll react to any of our changes to come, we can’t predict their speed of appearance. No one change, whether brain implants or mobile robots or shoes that snitch on you, will matter much—if it takes a century to come. We’ll adjust. But what if it happens in a few decades? And what if everything else is changing just as quickly?

So even if we could see every last link in our swarm, we still can’t predict it. It’s far too non-linear. No public forecast of the future can be right. Even were it to have proved accurate, had it been kept secret, once it’s published, our knowledge of it would change our future. Most of us would ignore it, as we ignore most things. But if it strikes a nerve, some of us might work to bring it about. Others of us might work to stop it from happening. Whoever wins, the resulting future won’t be the same as the forecast had stated it would be. No public forecast can predict its own effect. It can’t predict how many of us will either fight it or push it, nor how many of us will try to predict how many of us will fight or push and try to profit from that, nor how many of us will try to predict how many of us will try to profit, and thus profit from that, and so on. Pattern recognition leads to pattern exploitation. Thus, a public forecast can come true only if none of us cares about it. In other words, our only useful predictions are our predictably useless ones. Call it Gödel’s Inanity Theorem.

These days there’s much talk of living in a time of change, but most of us don’t appreciate just how fast changes might come. Nor do we appreciate just how much change may be heading our way. Physics reached the atomic level on Friday December 14th, 1900. On that day, Max Planck’s introduced the idea of the quantum. Forty-five years later we had nuclear weapons. But the same work also gave us nuclear power, televisions, computers, lasers, microwaves, X-ray crystallography, electron microscopes. From those we got fiber optics, satellites, robots, global networking, the structure of genes. And after those came smart drugs, stem cell treatments, cloning, tissue engineering, lab-grown organs, engineered microbes, vat-grown food, mobile electronics. We gained whole new classes of materials and drugs and jobs and ways of life, and a vastly deeper understanding of the cosmos. Our changes were vastly larger than just new weapons. On the other hand, we built those new weapons first.

We’re all dolts compared to what we’re making. We’re trying to work a colossal machine we barely understand by pulling unmarked levers we barely see. So if our mental tools keep speeding up we may be headed for a severe, perhaps terminal, technology shock. Whatever the future options of those who can live at the bleeding edge of technological change, most of us will be far behind the curve. We’ll be out of the loop, but will still have the political clout to retard adoption locally simply because the latest change is just too strange. But that’ll only mean that adoption won’t be widespread, not that it won’t happen at all. So, regardless of how fast our newest tools become available, their average adoption will remain slow. That slowness will only rise in relative proportion as the distance increases between the latest technology and the technology in general use. Thus, the faster our waves of new technology hit, the less uniformly spread their results will be. Many of us may be cowering in our shelters, or fleeing what we see as a holocaust of change, literally unable to comprehend what’s happening.

Thus, the proportion of us with awareness of, access to, ability to afford, and willingness to use, our newest tools will likely shrink as that technological gap widens. That’ll then lead to vast gulfs in ability between nations, then within countries—perhaps, one day, even within households—with kids embracing the latest tech while their parents can’t even begin to understand its purpose. After 50,000 years, our species seems to be readying itself to split apart into several daughter species, each with their own level of power. Forget aliens from a different planet, we’re about to be invaded by aliens from this planet.

Into the Wild

How likely is that kind of runaway future? Is it possible at all, or is it mere gibbering? And if it’s possible, could it really happen within only a few decades? On the one hand, it seems impossible to say anything. Too many things can change. Folks who claim to foretell the future are usually either lying or selling something. On the other hand, some changes are fairly predictable. A century or two ago, it didn’t take much cleverness to predict cars. A Jules Verne could do it easily. After all, a car is just a horseless carriage. Call that a first-order prediction. Not many of us can do it, but some can. But how many of us could’ve predicted traffic lights? How about motels? Who could have foreseen gridlock, jumper cables, parking tickets, smog? What about toy cars? Or drive-ins? Those are second-order predictions. You first have to foresee cars, then foresee the network effects of having a lot of them. But even bits of that might be sort of predictable to the intensely clever. An H. G. Wells could sometimes do it—except that almost no one would believe him. But who could’ve predicted drive-by shootings? Or fast-food joints? Or the pleasures of the back seat? Or increased genetic mixing because of easier transport over longer distances? How could you even begin to see such possibilities if you don’t think that our food, sex, and violence habits could change? Those are third-order predictions. They’re effectively impossible for any of us to foresee.

We might have a chance if we could see clearly what we do now, but even that we don’t do. For example, many of us think that our stock markets are mainly about greed. Even many stock brokers think that. Greed is surely what drives it, but more greed isn’t its only effect. Suppose some stock market gamblers think that next year’s rice harvest will be poor. They might then buy futures on rice a year from now. (In other words, they agree to buy some of next year’s rice at today’s price.) They’re betting that the price of rice will go up in a year. If next year’s harvest is indeed bad, they’ll make money. If next year’s harvest is good, they’ll lose money. They think they’re betting just to make money, but because of their bet, rice farmers are insured against their crops going too cheaply if next year’s harvest is good. Those farmers pay for that insurance out of some of their profits if the harvest is bad. The bet has thus erased most of their uncertainty about the future. They’ve been insured without asking for it, or perhaps even knowing about it. Nor are farmers the only insured. All of us who’ll be eating rice a year hence have also had much of our uncertainty erased because of that one bet. The price of next year’s rice is now more predictable. We no longer have to set aside extra money to buy possibly dearer rice next year. On the other hand, we lose the windfall we would’ve gained had rice indeed been cheaper next year. In short, all of us have swapped risk for benefit in an unplanned, uncontrolled shell game. We’ve shifted some risk to those who can best bear it while also shifting some potential profit to them as well. Thus, while futures bettors think they’re gambling to make money, they’re in fact in the insurance business. They just don’t know it.

Once upon a time, the fog of the future was generations away. It was easy to tell what the future would be because, mostly, the future was the same as the past. The bundle of technologies that we today know as farming took 5,000 years to seep from Iraq to England. In 1753 the colonies that would one day become the United States got their first steam engine. It was smuggled from Britain to New Jersey that year. Folks living only two days’ walk away still hadn’t heard of it 17 years later. Once upon a time, it took generations before various of our groups would accept a new energy source, a new medical treatment, a new way to create, organize, or pass on knowledge. No longer. Our past innovators had no large credit pool to pay for tools and labor. They had no large infrastructure to multiply research. They had no large research teams to work with. Nor could they draw on large pools of the published work of millions of professional thinkers worldwide. Nor did they have large factories to turn the idea into reality, nor global distribution mechanisms to move it and sell it, nor global stock markets to fuel it and direct it, nor global competitors drooling after the next big idea. In short, once upon a time, we had no dense and diverse network leveraging each new idea.

So we can’t say much about our future changes. We might, however, be able to say something about their speed. Over recent decades a few technologists have done just that. They’ve argued that our latest tools, notably computers, and their consequences, especially robots and digital networks, imply that we’re headed toward a time of runaway technological change. They dub it the singularity. Roughly speaking, it’s postulated to be a time when intelligence fully liquefies so that we can rapidly solve any technical problem that we can state carefully enough.

In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which extrapolation from known points is impossible. In physics, a singularity (there known as a black hole) happens when so much mass concentrates in one place that its own gravity crushes the strong nuclear force. The entire mass collapses into a point and there the normal laws of physics don’t apply. Biology, too, has at least one singularity: the emergence of life from non-life. Chemistry is also now creating an idea of a singularity with the discovery of synergetic reaction networks. Beyond each such singularity, reality reboots. A technological singularity, then, would be a time when technological change avalanches so often and so much that the basics of our existence would change. For one of us today, trying to imagine what life might be like after it would be like a fish trying to imagine a bicycle.

Is that our future? The idea has led to argument between technocrats and technocritics. In that crat-versus-crit debate, the crits seem to have all of history on their side. Regardless of what we might say we want today, we’ve always been against change. And the more radical the change, the less eager we are to make it. So crits often call crats techno-apocalyptics yearning for the equivalent of religious end times. In return, crats often dismiss crits as Luddites. Stated that baldly, neither side is especially convincing. Given what we’re now learning about our swarm though, singularists seem more right than wrong. The network effects behind our recent tool changes go back a long way, perhaps at least as far back as we’ve been a species. They’re unlikely to diminish anytime soon.

Singularists also argue for rapid, fundamental, and escalating changes, not just slow, superficial, and incremental ones. They’re speculating about things like brain implants or self-copying robots, not waterproof phones or moister lipsticks. That seems radical but it’s also likely true—at least, in the long run. Our swarm’s changes over the millennia have now much increased the amount of physical and mental resources we can throw at any technical problem. We seem unlikely to stop that anytime soon.

Singularists, however, also tend to assume that our phase change will be desirable. That might be their largest error. While a singularity’s final result might well be highly desirable for most of us, if one occurs soon it might be the most disruptive event our species will ever undergo because we’re nowhere near ready for it. Were it to happen, it would happen so quickly that it would be a far bigger rupture than even our industrial phase change, and that happened in at least four stages spread over more than two centuries. It’s when facing a potential phase change as huge as a singularity that we realize just how much we delude ourselves when we say that we love change. In reality, most of us are petrified of it.

The key question then is: If a singularity is indeed possible, when might it occur? Singularists often claim that it’ll happen soon—often within as little as 15 to 25 years. That seems unlikely. Such high speed seems to ignore the time and effort needed to get to, and stay on, the crest of change. It also seems to ignore the immense difficulty of the technical problems involved, the contrariness of human nature, the likelihood of sabotage, the possible effects of climate change, and the chance of a general war. Everything takes longer and costs more than anyone thinks it will—and it always has more bugs than anyone thinks is even possible. How fast our swarm accepts any particular change will affect how fast other changes can follow that change. For example, we can’t predict precisely when (or even if) intelligence may fully liquefy within our species. It’s also possible that we’ll near the intelligence threshold that a putative singularity needs, then freeze there, crossing it, if ever, only far in our future. That last seems unlikely though. If we get close to the abyss, competition may well force us over its edge.

The sheer muddle of human affairs suggests at least a doubling of the time to perhaps 30 to 50 years. A ten-fold increase though seems unlikely. Our swarm’s next phase change, if it indeed comes, probably won’t wait until we have brains the size of watermelons millennia from now. If it happens, it won’t even wait until we can boldly split infinitives that no one has ever split before. If it happens at all, it may well happen sometime this century, for we’re already on the cusp of major change. Our overall species intelligence is already beginning to liquefy. We seem to be within sight of closing many catalytic loops of the major reactions affecting our food, labor, material resources, new ventures, medicine, and mental resources. The more we learn in any one area, the more quickly will that learning catalyze every other area, which in turn will catalyze the first area. If such a synergetic and stigmergic cascade were to one day start happening on a mass scale and in real-time, we would enter autocatalytic runaway. As happened during our farming and industrial phase change, that would produce some new synergetic network, which would phase change us into some new state.

But were that to happen soon, it couldn’t possibly happen to all of us at once. Today only about 22 percent of us are rich and stable enough to even hear of it, far less be even vaguely ready for it. Of that rich billion or so, only a few million are rich and knowledgeable enough to take advantage of it. Plus, as usual, we’ll be tinkering with things that we have no idea how to control. Even if we survive long enough for all of us to phase change, not all of us will be dancing in the streets because it can’t happen slowly enough for all of us to be comfortable with it. So our elites will be the first to pass through our door into the future, and they’ll lug our species baggage through that door with them. They’ll use their new advantages to further increase their advantages. That escalation alone may destroy all our social arrangements, like ice cubes under a hammer. So, like the industrial age bursting out of the womb of the agrarian age, our coming birth pangs are likely to be painful. Plus, it may happen ten times faster—20 years instead of 200. Such speed might even be terminal.

We’re used to a world where our problems are relatively small and local—essentially tribal. We’ve never been able to solve any problem larger or more complex than that. However, these days our largest potentially solvable problems are global and systemic. We have little experience with solving them, or even of trying to solve them. We have little hope of doing so in future if we continue as we are now. It seems possible for us to work together to solve our serious systemic problems, but several things would have to happen before that could happen. We’d need many new collaborative mental tools. We’d need new global infrastructure to support those tools. We’d need new ways both of organizing ourselves and rewarding effort to thus support our working in transient, focused teams—metaconcerts. Plus, we’d need to speedup the uplift of the bulk of our population. Most of all, we’d first need to see that all that is necessary. To see that, we’d need to see what’s likely ahead for us were we to do nothing.

We seem to be nearing a major and rapid phase change yet few of us today know it’s even possible. All our current political, economic, legal, and military arrangements have been shaped for a relatively slow industrial age. And before that, an even slower agrarian age. And behind that, a nearly static nomadic age. Our assumptions about how reality works derive from our past mixed in with our biases toward seeing life tribally and linearly. We miss the network in the light of the individual. We thus see ourselves in terms of heroes and winners and human will. Those biases come from ages upon ages of limited and local intelligence, slow and limited communication and transport, complete dependence on our own physical and mental labor, and long ages of private and sovereign entities—from the individual to the nation. All that may be about to change. In particular, many long-term network trends are already nearing a peak in our next few decades. Population, urbanization, industrialization, rich world aging, poor world enrichment, debt servicing, oil depletion, clean water demand, energy-expensive food, computer technology, global networking, sharpening inequity, climate change, are all coming to a boil at about the same time. So we might well be headed to the brink of crisis.

Waking Up...

If whatever calls itself human a few centuries from now looks back at us today, they may see today’s anxieties about the future much as we today see a monk in Canterbury in 1178 laboring over his cathedral’s chronicle as he writes of the signs that the world was coming to an end. But for us today, with the fog of the future so close now, we have no idea what’s coming next. Surprise is unavoidable. As we peer into the fog is that sound we hear the pitter-patter of a bunny rabbit coming to be petted? Or is it the swoosh of an express train? Crisis in our near future is hardly unlikely when we consider the range of possibilities. Imagine a world where millions of us died for ivory and rubber, where millions more of us are dying for tantalum and copper, where 27 million of us are enslaved, where 852 million of us are starving, and where each year six million of our children under five die from curable disease. If that world could exist, a lot of worlds can exist.

Our swarm changes, but we ourselves don’t change. There hasn’t been enough time yet. So if some of us might see our possible near future as unsettling it’s not because we’ll be anything new, but because we’ll be just the same as before—except with everything changing around us far faster than before. If rapid, widespread, and ill-distributed change is indeed in our future, then the usual ways that we today think of ourselves and how we work likely won’t give us the reflexes to cope. Even if we could over time develop such reflexes, we may not have the time. And even if we did, we may not see the need to change our reflex ways of thought until there’s some crisis.

Could that really happen? Well, it’s happened before. In 1897, Jan Bloch, a Polish banker and economist, predicted that the next European war would be the world’s first total war. It would be fought by millions of conscripts. It would be so expensive and destructive that it would lead to economic failure, civil disorder, and probably even socialist revolution. “Soldiers may fight as they please; the ultimate decision is in the hands of famine.” Bloch based his prediction on his analysis of the technologies behind Europe’s last 30 years of war. He ignored our usual arguments. “I am dealing not with moral considerations, which cannot be measured, but with hard, matter-of-fact, material things, which can be estimated and measured.” He studied rates of fire, bullet penetrance, ricochet wounding, logistics, financing, taxation, and so on. Then he extrapolated based on the latest guns, smokeless powder, range finders, railway capacities, food supply, credit, banking, and inflation. He concluded that deathrates would be so extreme that after the first hotblooded clash, armies would refuse to attack. They’d dig in, facing each other for years at a time. The fight would turn into a meat-grinding slaughter by long-range artillery. There’d be no quick, decisive battles. Victory wouldn’t go to the bravest or fairest, as European belief at the time had it. It would go to the last economy standing. Plus, if Europe continued to spend crushing sums on arms, world power would shift to the United States and Asia.

Summaries of his 3,271-page book were widely read. Parts of it were translated from Polish to Russian, French, German, English, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish. Partly because of it, Europe held its first ever Peace Conference, at the Hague in 1899. The attendees enjoyed themselves. For the press, they cheerily said that all Europe could see that war was bad. “A little good faith and sincere efforts” would see them through. A disappointed Bloch wrote that the “facts... run too strongly counter to the vested interests of the most powerful class... [for them to] reform. And this I foresaw from the first. What I could not foresee was the stubbornness which not only recoiled from taking action but set itself to twist and distort the facts.” Meanwhile, Europe continued to arm.

Europe’s political and military leaders couldn’t take Bloch seriously. If he were right, they were wrong—dead wrong. So, all over Europe, they sneered at Bloch. “[A]ll that trash written by M. Bloch... heralded nothing but disaster. War is essentially the triumph... of one will over a weaker will.” Bloch’s book was bad for morale, so it couldn’t be right. He left no room for bravery, honor, and leadership, and those decided every battle. He also said unmanly things—like the spade would be as important as the gun. He dared to say that both the bayonet and the cavalry charge were obsolete. Britain’s Cavalry Training Manual noted that “the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge and the terror of cold steel.” Some even went so far as to blame Bloch for recent military failures. Those failures were “entirely traceable to the vicious teachings of that misguided school whose fallacies find their highest expression in the works of M. Bloch.” Plus, Japan’s recent victory over Russia, with just 130,000 dead, showed that war could still be a short sharp knock. Besides, Bloch wasn’t even in the military; he just read a lot and did a bunch of math, so what could he know? Finally (although they didn’t say this publicly) war was fun. And good for promotions. Plus you could win land, trade concessions, and other valuable prizes. So, yes, they admitted, his facts seemed right, but his conclusions must be wrong. Well-led men of stout heart would always triumph over the machine, no matter how withering its rate of fire.

Europe’s writers, journalists, and futurists nearly all said the same thing. Hundreds of war yarns, plus hundreds of newspaper and magazine predictions, continued to paint a mostly rosy future for Europe. They resembled the real war to come about as well as Gilligan’s Island resembled real castaways. Even H. G. Wells, who accepted Bloch’s analysis, couldn’t quite accept his conclusions. For most everyone else, war was fun. For whites with Maxim guns facing non-whites with spears, war for Europeans was still about bravado and derring-do. At the time, Europe was busy dismembering, er, civilizing, Africa. Eight million Africans were dying in the Congo alone. In 1906, one even ended up in the Bronx Zoo. A year later, Jack London even wrote about using biowar to kill a billion Chinese—to thus make the world safe for whites. Besides, no European leader would be so insane as to start, let alone fight, Bloch’s war. Killing non-whites and stealing their stuff for their own good was one thing, but Europe’s leaders would never flush away a whole generation of European men. Europe was already too far up the ladder of moral progress for that to happen. Then came 1914.

Just before that “war that will end war” H. G. Wells wrote that the next one would be global and would use nuclear weapons to destroy whole cities—31 years before Hiroshima. But readers didn’t take his fiction seriously. Despairing, by 1920 he’d written a 1,324-page history of our species, hoping to deflect what he saw as our slide into the pit. It sold millions upon millions of copies; even today it’s still perhaps the most popular history ever written. In it he concluded that history had become “a race between education and catastrophe.” He thought that our problem of dealing with avalanching technical change was mainly that the wrong fools were in power. It was their fault. So once we educated ourselves enough we’d see through their shams and simply oust them and everything would be wonderful from then on.

In the 1920s, many of his readers thought that in short order we’d arrange global meetings, calmly discuss our options, and—without bias or hysteria—figure out what’s best for us to do. Sixty-two nations got together and vowed to give up war. Meanwhile, an English bishop called for a decade-long pause in science and engineering. “We could get on very much more happily if aviation, wireless, television and the like were advanced no further than at present.... It would give 99 per cent. of us who are non-scientific some chance of assimilating the revolutionary knowledge which in the first quarter of this century 1 per cent. of the explorers have acquired. The 1 per cent. would have leisure to read up on one another’s work; and all of us might go meanwhile in tardy quest of that wisdom which is other than and greater than knowledge, and without which knowledge may be a curse.” The idea struck a nerve, especially in the Depression-era United States. Calls for such a ban continued for a decade. Many of us in rich countries began to tell ourselves that we were better off in ignorance, better off without science and its fruits, better off living as our ancestors had. This time we’d no longer seek to know, no longer seek advantage. This time for sure. Then came 1939.

After that war, the same crisis of confidence came as after the previous one. The same blame game started, and many of the same things happened. As usual, we relabeled our past, turning the question of why the war happened into a quest to find the bad guy. Once again we found ways to blame it on someone—and thereby disown it—and thereby distance ourselves from it. That coping mechanism helps us distance ourselves from any of our actions that we don’t like. It also helps us credit ourselves for anything we like. We thus get to attach causal labels to everything that happens to us. When it’s something we like, then ‘we’ did it. When it’s something we don’t like, then foreigners did it, militants did it, imperialists did it. If not them, then whites did it, non-whites did it, men did it, corporations did it. If all else fails, our leaders did it, a conspiracy did it, our ancestors did it. Regardless of what happens to us, we’re always trying to answer one question above all: Who’s the bad guy?

But perhaps you’ve already found a way to distance all that from yourself. Perhaps you’ve dismissed it by noting that our actions since 1897 had more than a little to do not so much with the possible destruction of our species, but with the fear of relative loss of power of some one of our nations. Or perhaps you’ve dismissed it by noting that crisis is always more fun to predict than the humdrum. It gets more press too. Both objections seem reasonable. However, if you’re thinking that we therefore can’t be mugged by the future again then consider how many times we’ve thought that before. It’s easy to think that today we are, somehow, better than we used to be. That, somehow, we’re no longer slaves to foolishness, flattery, folktales. It’s pleasing to feel that we no longer suffer fools to have power—or that if we do, it’s easy to find non-fools to do the same job. It’s comforting to believe, as the Victorians and many others before them did, that we today aren’t simply better off, we’re simply better—that we today truly are, at long last, different. But even were all that true, there are at least three reasons why it may not make any difference.

First, thanks to strengthening network effects, our technology is already making for huge differences between our rich and poor. It doesn’t matter that our poor are getting richer. Our rich are getting even richer far faster. As that skew grows, our poor may feel ever more anger and our rich may feel ever more guilt. Thus all our governments, whether rich and poor, may well feel ever more pressure to do something—anything—to appease their peoples and thus retain power, just as our doctors do in the face of any new disease. Further, as our technology continues to ramp up, the decision window that any nation will have to decide what to do in any particular case will decline even more than it already has. Thus, the chance that whatever they decide to do will actually help anything, even assuming that they get a chance to do it, will shrink. Finally, what matters here isn’t any particular possible future change, but how fast it might come to be—and how many other changes it might bring with it. We’re now busily extruding ever more of ourselves into our world. We’re liquefying intelligence. In ten years, changes may come that none of us today have yet predicted. In twenty years, changes may come that none of us today could predict. In thirty years, changes may come that none of us today could understand. It doesn’t matter what our new choices may be; it only matters how fast they appear.

However, two other forces might stand against those three forces. First, as our tools improve we may grow more contented with our lot. Yes, our rich will grow richer far faster, but our poor won’t be quite as destitute as today. Not so many of our babies will be dying. Further, as our global collaborative tools improve some of us may see our systemic problems more clearly. Our new collaborative tools may also let them band together to try to solve our problems more effectively than today.

Thus, kids born within the next decade may well grow up in a more constantly changing world than that of their parents and grandparents. Today, before they’re even born, the world is already linked with over a billion computers and over four billion phones, two-thirds of them mobile. In the world they’ll grow up in intelligence will be far more liquid than it is today. They’ll have powerful collaborative tools, and for some of them, global metaconcerts will be increasingly everyday affairs. They’ll have less of our present generation’s ineptness with, cluelessness about, and fear of, technology and technological change. In their world, thinking for yourself instead of accepting authority’s dogma might become easier than it is today. Whenever things change a lot, our next generations repurpose their tools to survive in the new climate. They’ll need them too, because the problems they’ll face may well be more intricate, more rewarding, or more deadly, than today’s problems are. Theirs may be our first generation to discover more new technical knowledge in one lifetime than our whole species has discovered in the entirety of human history. Our whole fact-economy will change since facts will be immensely plentiful—so insight about those facts will become the new scarcity. However, until that new generation gains power 40 or so years from now, two generations of increasingly confused, increasingly tetchy, and increasingly powerful people will remain the decision makers for our species. The jostling for global power between rich and poor and young and old will likely determine the shape of our near future.

If a new phase change is indeed ahead for us, and if we make it at least part way into the change, then the chance of species-destroying war might fall. The new age now being born, our information age, will likely make many of our resources cheaper. Perhaps the only thing we’ll have left to fight over will be the same one we’ve always fought over: who controls whom. Also, the faster we link catalytically, the more might we see that our local welfare is tied to our global welfare. So some of the fruits of war might thus sour as we both have more, and have more in common. That’s already happened among rich nations today. Further, the catalysts leading to rapid change will likely also lead to rapid response to those changes from those of us who’re most frightened by them. That alone might act as a massive brake. Lastly, each of our industrial populations phase changed once its middle class grew big enough and resources available to the average person crossed a certain threshold. The same is happening all over the globe now that our species as a whole has moved into our first urban age. However, that phase change may be at least 30 to 40 years away for our poorer nations. And that’s a long time in a period of high-speed change.

None of our potential future changes need be scary, or even particularly surprising—once we’re prepared for it. But if, as our new tools appear, we start to jolt around like water sloshing in a swinging bucket, many of us may lose faith in our usual certainties. If so, we’re likely to react badly. And as the newest miracles, whatever they may be, appear in our shop-windows, our floundering governments will likely tell those of us with our noses pressed to the glass that we must have patience, by which they’ll mean that the new tech must be preserved for the rich only. Meanwhile, they’ll quietly hire more police and arm more robots.

As our newest tools give us more power, our powerless will use them to seek power. Our mighty will use the same tools to keep power. We’ll fight. First will come the marching, the cheering, then will come the running, the screaming. Soon, technologies that to many of us today may seem extremely unlikely may be common. Miracles of food, medicine, materials, and energy will likely come to be. But so too will powerful weapons—and they, too, will become cheap, then uncontainable. Total defense will likely grow more and more expensive until, one day, anyone with a grudge may be able to do just about anything to just about anyone.

Thus all our societies may be about to burst apart like a runover dog, because as a species we’re unlikely to so quickly alter our tribal ways and thus reduce the pressures leading to conflict. Our ultrarich, whether people or nations, will continue to do mostly just as they please, but our merely rich, both people and nations, likely won’t be able to, because our poor of that time will likely be able to do things to them that they really won’t like. So maybe to avoid that, in a few decades our rich will be preparing preemptive compassion strikes, surgical first-response gifts, and acts of ruthless generosity instead of the usual bombs and missiles—or police and guard dogs. And of course, no matter how much we change from taking what we want then using force to deter attack, at some point patience will wear thin and we’ll go to war. If there really is a deluge of technological change heading our way, then the species that emerges from it, if one does, may be full of many very small, very strong, blocs—and very polite people. We’re giving birth to something but we don’t even know if we’re the baby or the placenta. Today’s seemingly hard problems may be merely the last sip of air before the scream.

We risk much to have all. This, perhaps our final game against the cosmos as a single species, may well be worth its ante, but we’re also locked in the casino—and have been for at least the last 11,000 years. As our rate of change climbs, our emotions will drive us to our same old blame game. We’ll continue to replace all complex questions with: Who’s the bad guy? Various groups of us will identify various other groups as bad guys—and take the usual steps. But for now, many of us in poor countries will continue to blame rich countries. And many of us in rich countries will continue to blame technology.

Technology often triggers change. But blaming it for change only makes our current trajectory, and our next change, harder to see—and even harder to prepare for. We’ve always used information, and its resulting technology, to serve our passions. Our technology didn’t create those passions. Technology didn’t start 50 years ago with the computer. Or 500 years ago with the printing press. Or 5,000 years ago with writing. It goes back at least 50,000 years to our new stone tools, and the changes in our brain that led to them. The wave of technological change that’s probably heading our way will likely be just the same. However, it’ll likely differ in both size and speed. It’s one thing to go from horses to cars in a generation. It’s quite another to go from horses to spaceships in a year. Such high speed touches a deep part of us, our need for certainty and meaning. Many of us, poor and rich alike, will want life tomorrow to be the same as life yesterday. We’ll want to be sure of our place, to know the final answer, the real purpose of life. We’ll want dogma. And the faster things change around us, the more we’ll want it because science isn’t enough.

Science is hard for us. It’s complex, full of math, and it tries hard to be impersonal. We’re not good at any of that. It also often says things that we really don’t want to hear. Mainly though, it’s hard because it’s too frankly provisional. Even with all that we know today, most of what there is to know, we don’t know. And the more we learn, the more we learn what else we don’t know. Scientists are used to that. But most of us outside science don’t know how to not know. We prefer to be certain, even if we’re certainly wrong. So we keep picking leaders who tell us simple things in a firm enough voice. We want to think that if we don’t know, at least they know. Someone must contend on our behalf against the demon of uncertainty. Thus, we’ll likely continue to wave our flags, polish our medals, and sharpen our swords. None of what our science has learned about our network dynamics in the last few decades is likely to make the smallest difference. We’ll continue to look at the parts not the whole. We’ll continue to assume intentionality where none may exist. We’ll continue to look to place blame. Regardless of what our new science tells us—and what our new technology gives us—the more that things change around us, the more will we seek some continuity with our past, and the more will we search for a simple answer to a seemingly simple question: Who’s the bad guy?

...In a Dark Night with Anxious Love Inflamed

Aristotle began his Metaphysics by saying that all of us by nature desire to know. He was right, and wrong. We do desire to know, especially when young, but as Kant later saw, desiring to know can also be a dare. We aren’t in charge of our swarm. We aren’t even aware that we aren’t in charge of our swarm. That swarm might even be alive, in some sense. And over long time spans that may be the single most pertinent thing about us.

But although a swarm view might explain many things about us, most of us are unlikely to accept its removed view. It clothes itself in no flag, it offers no point of comfort, it praises no one. It also blames no one. It fails to assign guilt for the Final Solution. It doesn’t fault anyone for the Trail of Tears. It neglects singling out anyone in particular for censure when explaining the Triangle Trade. In it, neither the Gulag nor the Laogai have any moral dimension. Nor do the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the raping of Nanjing, the nuking of Hiroshima. The Silent Holocaust, the Great Calamity, the Disappeared, Operation Searchlight, the Stolen Generations, the Death Squads, the Comfort Women—none point fingers. Neither the Cultural Revolution nor the Killing Fields carry reproofs. Bangladeshi genocide, Timorese genocide, Cambodian genocide, Bosnian genocide, Rwandan genocide, Sudanese genocide, all our pyramids of skulls everywhere are as sinless as an avalanche.

We can’t exist in such a world, a world stripped of moral labels. Given the way our story-telling brains work, without reading meaning into the universe we probably can’t read it at all. Take away sin and you also take away grace. Without responsibility, our legal systems would collapse. Our economic, military, and political systems would follow. Without sin, we can’t explain suffering. Without intention, there’s no honor, no bravery, no forgiveness. Without judgment, there’s no compassion, no sacrifice, no love. And without those, what’s the point of anything at all? So we wish to live in a linear world, a world ruled by intention, even if that may not be the world as today’s science sees it.

Science gives us many answers to our questions but the question of human purpose isn’t one that it can answer. It tells us that we’re adrift in a huge, dark, and cold space, a space we’ve barely begun to map, can’t fully control, and don’t entirely understand. We might not even be capable of fully understanding it. It doesn’t love us. It doesn’t even hate us. It’s simply indifferent whether we live or die. If it has a God at all, it’s Spinoza’s God. It’s not even indifferent about us in particular. It’s indifferent about all life. At least 99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. One day, ours will be too. We might be snuffed out tomorrow at 11:23a.m. by an asteroid we’d never even see coming. At least a thousand rocks big enough to do the job are circling out there, somewhere. One whacked Jupiter in 1994. Had it hit us, we’d have been gone in a blink.

In the universe that our science paints for us, we’ve no definition, no purpose, no reason for being. In it, our forebears lived and died in vain. So shall we today. So shall our inheritors, generation upon pointless generation. In that universe, every religion is a shout into an empty well and all life is meaningless. Of course, that’s hardly news to some of us, even outside science. Where be your gibes? Your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment? But now we have equations and graphs and high-resolution digital pictures to lay over Yorick’s grave. That universe is far too cold for most of us. So we mostly ignore it, caught in the moment and our daily concerns. That gives us much smaller, warmer, and cozier universes, universes where we matter.

Our religions have always made us matter. They can give us both meaning and certainty. Recently—and only shallowly—some of us have replaced them with a belief in ‘progress.’ That belief served Europe and its descendants well for over three centuries. However, as commonly interpreted, that belief is a faith, just as every other religion is. But those of us who live our lives by science often choose to ignore that. We wish to think that explaining how we might have come to exist is the same as explaining why we exist. It’s not. ‘How’ isn’t the same as ‘why.’ Scientists, engineers, and doctors can give us ‘how.’ They can quantify progress in grams, watts, and life expectancies. The fruits of their work have changed our lives enormously. But most of us live outside that charmed circle. To many of us outside science, the new religion of technological progress is like eating chocolate-flavored cardboard. It’s tastier than plain cardboard, but it’s still cardboard. What we want instead is moral progress.

Whether we believe in moral progress or not, we want what our older religions give—we want certainty and meaning. What we hold sacred, whether it’s one of our older religions, or one of our newer ones—progress, capitalism, communism, democracy, and the like—gives our lives meaning. They’re how we make sense of the cosmos. Even if life were to mean nothing, it must, for us, still mean something. We story tellers can see the world no other way. That’s why we want ‘why.’ Our science can’t help us with that.

Our technology is no better. It doesn’t guarantee us meaning. It can’t promise us certainty. It gives us neither purpose nor happiness. Yet it’s also part of who and what we are. For at least 50,000 years we’ve never been without it. There’s no such thing as a non-technological human being. Our technology is an outpouring of our hearts, and an expression of our art and our feeling, as much as it is a practical response to challenges to our survival and comfort. It pampers us and scares us all at once. It’s our beloved monster. And now that our monster has grown big enough to carry us, maybe we have no human-knowable destiny but we at least seem to have a destination—at least for the next little while. After 50 or more millennia of slow and jerky growth as our shambling, ramshackle companion, our faithful companion has now picked us up and is beginning to run.

Today, some of us, especially in our rich world see that speedup as a threat. But we’ve survived speedups before. Nor is today the first time we’ve noticed this particular one. We first began to sense it around 1816. The year before, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia had blown up. It was the most explosive eruption in history and it led to massive and abrupt climate change. Temperatures worldwide plunged so much that in northern climes the following summer was mostly a continuation of winter. In Britain, for various reasons linked to the rising steam engine, the rising industrial and middle classes, and the end of the 22-year-long Napoleonic wars, the sudden cold and famine brought the government to the brink of collapse. To Britain’s aristocracy, everything seemed to be falling apart.

That summer, long after the dead were counted and the rubble ceased to shake, two poets, Byron and Shelley, fled scandal in England for the calm of Switzerland. They took with them 18-year-old Mary Godwin, and her 17-year-old half-sister, Claire. Claire was secretly carrying Byron’s child. She was also probably one of Shelley’s lovers. Mary had so far had two babies with Shelley (while he was married and had two other kids). In 1816, they all settled around Lake Geneva. But thanks to Tambora, instead of the soothing Swiss weather they expected, they met with huge lightning storms. One night, trapped by yet another volcano-belched storm, they challenged each other to write ghost stories—appropriate reflections of the electric weather. Mary worked on hers over the next year. Once again pregnant, still unmarried, still threatened by Claire’s relationship with Shelley, and haunted by the memory of waking to find her first infant dead beside her, she grew her story of blighted birth into a novel. It begins and ends with a monster trudging through icy wastes. Not with steam but with the newest Promethean mystery, electricity, did she give her foul-limbed monster life. Our usual grubby human dilemmas, plus death and destruction half a world away and a year before, had birthed a tale that still speaks to us today: Frankenstein.

But Mary’s novel of a mismade future was only a straw in the gathering storm of Britain’s many changes at the time. By 1816, half of Britain had already shifted to non-rural employment. New industries were rising everywhere, everything was changing, and the air was choked with crazy news, just as it is today now that half of us have moved into cities. Back then folks were going up in balloons, finding electricity in frogs, talking about steaming across the Atlantic. They were magically preserving meat by boiling it in cans, and inventing new ways to make this and that. They were discovering new planets, new animals, new elements, new facts about the earth. Others were digging up inexplicable monster bones. Some were speculating that stars and planets changed. A few even dared to claim that we’d come from orangutans. Whole new fields, like chemistry and geology and paleontology, were condensing out of thin air. Europe’s entire coherent world, built up in stages over the centuries, was caving in, like a sandcastle facing an onrushing wave of new data and new tools. Suddenly, it seemed, she and her friends were no longer sure of even such ancient basics as the age of the earth, the origin of life, the place of the soul. It was an industrial eruption just as big as Tambora. The excitement exhilarated many. It scared many, too.

It needn’t, however, have been a surprise. That decoherence had been growing in Europe since at least Copernicus in 1514, three centuries before. However, only a barely understood, easily ignored few saw what was happening. Most Europeans clung to the old tales and the old ways, ignoring the growing rumble under their feet. And most of the rest of us around the world never even heard about it in the first place. But by 1816 Britain’s new industrial volcano made it impossible for its young well-to-do sensitives to avoid the new questioning attitude, and then the storms of new thought came upon them. As they strolled about London’s West End, taking the air of an evening in Oxford Street or the Strand and playing their usual courtship games, they were awed by the new gaslight in Pall Mall. Hearing the clatter of the hackneys, smelling the burning whale lamp oil and the ever present sweat and horse dung, the swelling ranks of England’s growing back-to-nature Romantic movement blithely avoided the ruined beggars and ragged hawkers as they gossiped about the new marvels. With the mysterious steam engine beginning to energize their world, everything was becoming ‘scientific.’ Who knew what strange delights, or terrors, might await them tomorrow?

In 1816 no one in Britain knew what to expect, not the rich and certainly not the poor. Their assumptions about the world were far too wrong for them to have any real idea what was coming—but they didn’t know that. Their universe was coming apart and their past hadn’t prepared them for that possibility. Everyone who could read felt that they were living through a unique, epoch-making time. The number of books published in England per year tripled between 1800 and 1820. And a new term, the Luddite, entered the language. What did it all mean? Who was bringing it about? What did they want? How to make them stop? Much of Mary’s book grew out of that fear of the future, which is why her words still live today, for there’s much fear of our future today. As a species, we’re now in Britain’s position back then. We’re now halfway to urbanization, and with the computer energizing everything around us, we’re shifting into an even larger phase change. Folks are talking about upgrading the brain, about enabling men to get pregnant, about creating life—literally. A computational volcano is beginning to erupt. What will it mean? We today don’t know any more than Mary did.

However, we today could tell that group of poets cowering around a storm-tossed Swiss lake in 1816 astounding things. We could tell them why the weather was so bad, and we could tell them to boil their water to avoid the cholera that it would soon help spread. To Shelley, we could expand on his Promethean imaginings by explaining how to cure the sick, give sight to the blind, speech to the mute, hearing to the deaf. We could tell him how to aid the halt, lengthen life, even augment the brain. To Mary, we could explain that her mother had died at age 38, 11 days after her birth, probably simply because her doctor hadn’t washed his hands. We could tell both Mary and Claire why nearly all their kids would die young, and we could explain what would kill each of them: typhus, malaria, dysentery, and tuberculosis. We could also tell them why over a billion of us today no longer suffer such illness, and why another two billion are moving in that direction. We could describe an unbelievable future to them where women in rich countries could vote, learn to read, hold jobs, own things, make contracts, write wills, bring lawsuits, not need dowries, burn their corsets, marry in their 30s without remark, get divorced, abort legally, buy contraceptives, not have seven or more kids, not fear childbirth, and (sometimes) even go out alone at night.

To Byron, we could explain why the steam engine would trigger far greater change than even he had foreseen. We could add that its final effects wouldn’t necessarily be bad, even for the poor. We could tell him what it’s like when more than two percent of us could vote. And what it’s like when many of us get over 14 years of schooling—instead of under two in his time. (Today, even Sudan, one of our poorest countries, averages two.) And what it’s like for many of us to live to 70 or 80, rather than dying before our early 40s. And what it’s like when many children don’t have to work, when not only lords have leisure time, when there’s a new thing for many called ‘retirement,’ and when the rich don’t always tower over the poor because they’re no longer, on average, five inches taller.

We could explain to him how the slaves his friends kept as draft animals and sex toys would come to be replaced by machines, and how their descendants would become citizens of many nations, including his own. We could explain the structure of the unreachable moon, and the stars and planets he used so often in his poetry. We could also describe engines to get there that he couldn’t possibly understand. We could tell him that his only legitimate daughter, the then six-month-old Ada, Countess of Lovelace, would be involved with a man who would design our first computer. It would be a device that would, in time, reboot reality even more than the steam engine ever did. And we could tell him that both he and Ada would die at the same age (36). And for the same reason—their doctors bled them to death.

All that we could tell them, for all that has changed in our swarm just since 1816. We needn’t necessarily fear our swarm’s changes. On the other hand, just because we today are better off doesn’t mean that we’re any better—or worse—than Byron and Shelley, Mary and Claire. Fifty years hence, if we survive, our descendants may feel exactly the same way about us today as we today feel about those dead writers. To our possible descendants it may be clear that those poets’ lives weren’t worth more, or worth less, than ours today just because they didn’t know about bacteria and black holes. They didn’t live in easier or harder times because they lacked both nukes and penicillin. Their lives weren’t made more complex, or less, because they had buggy whips and didn’t have jet engines. They weren’t morons because they chopped down their trees and fouled their rivers to fuel their industry. They weren’t callous because a scratch from a rose thorn could kill—nor because they didn’t know how to save their children from cholera and typhus. They weren’t beasts because some were well off while millions starved. Whether poor or rich, their tears were just as hot as ours are today. They did the best they could with what little they knew and what little they had. They did delude themselves though. Or rather, their ignorance of the world helped them hide many truths from themselves. But those of us alive today do the same, and for the same reasons. And, just as we today do, those long-dead poets filled the vacuum of their ignorance with convenient fictions.

Our past can force us to accept those truths, and perhaps that’s why it’s the most valuable thing we have. Our history is a book we’re constantly writing, like a diary of our ever forgetful species. It’s our offline memory, and in it we read the signs of our squalls, but also the signs of our unending strivings for a better day. As the summers flicker past on their hurrying way to some unknown end, each page is a surprise; each has something new to teach us about the human condition, but few of us ever read them. Even fewer of us sit with Bodhidharma, facing a wall for nine years seeking truth. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we prefer to listen to the same old stories. Our most popular ones—the ones we tell and retell—vary only in detail. Over the centuries they’ve gained a shape and a force that make them easy to remember, easy to tell, and easy to relate to what we think of as the bedrock of life. But that doesn’t make them true. Nowadays, most of us, poor and rich alike, get those stories by sucking on our TV’s ever available teat. Many of us love to complain about that, but in truth we want that disinfected, made-for-TV world. We want its celebrity trivia, its political circus clowns, its insta-mix solutions to our problems. We want the blue pill, never the red one. We want to put everything we don’t like about ourselves in a box labeled ‘the past.’ And anything that doesn’t fit in that box we want to put in another box labeled ‘their fault.’ We don’t want, in Auden’s terms, the situation of our time to surround us like a baffling crime. We’re hungry for linearity, for meaning, for purpose. We’ll always be so.

Our technology can’t change that. Our tools have always stood at the center of our lives, but they don’t so much solve our problems as redefine them. So our central concern isn’t with our technology; it’s with our never-answered but always-asked question: How shall I live my life? It will remain our central question until we understand so much more of the cosmos that we’re no longer human, until something that merely calls itself human takes our place. Meanwhile, today we still suffer. We still die. We still squander lives. We still crave intimacy and trust. We still need praise and generosity. We still admire heroes and sacrifice. We’re still confused by our passions, our consciousness, our intelligence. We’re still puzzled by the cosmos, and whether our particular sentences have any special meaning in it.

But from what we’re now discovering about complex networks we’ve already discovered a meaning, of a sort. Admittedly, it’s not the one that many of us may want, but at least we now know that we may be far larger and stranger than we’ve usually imagined. We, together, form a swarm, one vast, self-writing sentence. We are, quite literally, the word embodied, the word made flesh. We invent our own, much simpler, words and apply them to the things around us, thinking that we then understand them. Really though, we’ve only named them. We call one thing life, another thing mind, a third thing love, and in our simpleminded way we think we know what they mean, just as we think we know what the moon, the sun, and the stars mean. Yet when at night we lie awake we know that they’re all equally mysterious, all equally unknowable. Only now are we discovering just how intricate, just how ingenious, just how wondrous, life is. Only now are we beginning to see the wondrous among ourselves—recursive patterns whose workings we’re only now beginning to see. What we are isn’t a cause for guilt or shame, disgust or despair. It’s what we are, warts and all.

We today ride on the shoulders of a giant 50,000 years tall. We know now that we’re nest-builders, and, ultimately, we fashion that nest wholly of words. We add to it day by day, perched on our nest’s infrastructure—our technology—which we live in and on and with. That infrastructure is itself just the congealed form of our past words, which then live on after us, giving meaning to our children’s lives. Yet we’re also now discovering that although made mainly of our words, the things we name are stronger than the words we use to bind them to our will.

Our individual lives, as a dying Keats said of his own life, are sentences written in water. Little recursive patterns, they persist for a moment, then vanish like soap bubbles. But they also renew with each generation. Ignoring that too-common miracle, the miracle of life, many of us in rich countries today feel a sense of evening, a weariness caused by guilt at past wrongs, ignorance of present changes, and fear of future loss. So we keep searching, as did Pushkin, for any illusions that exalt us rather than ten thousand truths. But Godot is in the details. History is detail. Whenever we peer into a mirror, much of what blinks back is at least 50,000 years old, and most of it is millions of years older. Those old eyes have seen a lot, and they have brought us far. Perhaps they’ll recognize when the petty tribalism, willful ignorance, and assumed linearity that has brought us this far can carry us no further. If not, we may not have much further to go.

This particular story of us now ends as it began, with our fateful monster tracking a blank and icy waste, just as when our quest for lunch first changed in the emptiness of northern Iraq 11,600 years ago. We’re on an adventure, but to survive it we must first survive the changes likely to come over our next half century. We have just two pieces of evidence that we might survive. First, we’ve already survived a half century of nuclear threat. Second, our increasingly powerful technology isn’t itself why we kill. If it were, we’d have killed each other in far greater numbers at the end of the last century than at its beginning. On the other hand, for our last half century we had only to contain the tantrums of a few governments. Our next half century may well ferry that scale of power to individuals. Our tribal habits won’t function in such a world—or, at least, not for long. If we survive into the age to come we may have great power, yes, but that wonder is our terror too, for we shall hold Blake’s bows of burning gold with the same rough hands that held stone axes 50,000 years ago.

Yet even with our endless idiocy, our cheap ferocity, our unthinking selfishness, wherever we go, whatever we do, we look to each other for definition, for purpose. That’s how we bring meaning to our lives. We look, not just to the living who surround us, but also to our armies of dead, who suffered and died to win for us the information to make a difference. We look, too, to our unborn, who ask us to live so as to make their future lives worthwhile. Our progenitors and our progeny, that’s all we can be certain of. Our lives give their lives meaning, as their lives do ours. We have a power behind us and a future before us. Fifty thousand years, two thousand generations, stand behind us. Fifty years, two generations, stand before us. Those are the shoulders we stand on, and that is our meaning, if meaning we seek. It’s perhaps all the meaning we can reasonably ask. I am so that you can be. You are so that I must have been. Live so that it matters.