Modern Futurist Visions
in Retrospect
Sam Ghandchi
http://www.ghandchi.com/2224-futurists-english.htm
بازنگری ویزیونهای آینده نگری مدرن
http://www.ghandchi.com/2224-futurists.htm
Modern Futurism (1) dates back to the end of World War II when authors like Bertrand de Jouvenel in France and Ossip K. Flechtheim in Germany noted that the ideals of modern society cannot be achieved within the framework of the industrial society whether we choose Capitalism or Socialism. Later, Daniel Bell (2) in the United States, in his epic work The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which he considered as the "fourth" Volume of Marx's Capital, showed that the post-Industrial society is an Information Society where the production, in contrast to the industrial society, is centered around manipulation of information and not the goods. This scientific analysis which proved to be right by the developments of computer technologies, impacted all futurist visions of the last 50 years. If we look at the science fiction works of 1960's and 1970's, there is a lot of fascination with intelligent robots that were expected to supersede the human race. The themes of Star Trek, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits and most other works of science fiction in the 1960's centered around humanoids that were basically electronic based. But as we moved to 1980's and 1990's, with the start of Genomic project, the expectations to modify our genes to evolve beyond our current biology became widespread, whether we would call the new species a trans-human or a more evolved human. But in the last 20 years, we have been increasingly disillusioned with our vision for the prospects of biology, not only because of the side effects of gene therapy for animals and humans, and the side effects of GMO for plants, and also due to the slowness of biological processes which hinders quick progress in biological research, but we have also seen a more fundamental barrier, where contrary to our first understanding of genetics, it is not possible to separate software and hardware in the biological entities since they are extremely intertwined, and this inseparability is fundamentally in contrast to the structure of digital computers for which the rapid progress we have seen is thanks to the hardware and software being readily separable. In other words whatever we develop in software can easily be moved from one computer to another. These facts mean that our hopes for a major biological change as we move towards Singularity in the next 20 years, have been too optimistic. We need to redirect our focus in two directions. One is to make humanoids that are totally computer based (3). Secondly we need to focus on prosthetics to improve the quality of life for humans. It is becoming increasingly evident that as we move towards the technological Singularity proposed by Ray Kurzweil (4), we will be adopting humanoids who will have the capabilities to learn from us, and in the next 100 years the humanoids will be the most advanced sentient beings inheriting Earth and they will not be biological. It seems like our hopes to improve our human body to transition to a new variant (5) should change to accepting that new sentient beings will supersede the human race, sentient beings that will be non-biological but will learn from us the same way we learned from the knowledge and experience of our ancestors by the means of language and writing.
Hoping for a democratic and secular futurist republic in Iran,
http://www.ghandchi.com/index2.html
August 26, 2018
Footnotes:
1.
Modern Futurism
http://www.ghandchi.com/347-FuturismEng.htm
آینده نگری مدرن
http://www.ghandchi.com/347-Futurism.htm
2. Daniel Bell
دانیل بل
3. Nanobots or Humanoids
http://www.ghandchi.com/2164-nanobots-or-humanoids-english.htm
نانوباتها یا انسان نماها
http://www.ghandchi.com/2164-nanobots-or-humanoids.htm
4. Ray Kurzweil
ری کرزوایل
5. New Variant to Meet Human Needs-An Electronic
Book
http://www.ghandchi.com/human-variant-book-english.htm
واریانت جدید برای تأمین نیازهای بشر- کتاب الکترونیک
http://www.ghandchi.com/human-variant-book.htm
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