I recently had an invigorating vision of the future. This
came as a result of my encounter with Abundance
by Peter Diamandis and Steven Cotler. By rights I should be too old at 57 for
wide eyed optimism, but the authors have marshaled their arguments so
convincingly, from the broad outlines of global infrastructures to the
nanoscopic gadgets that will soon rebuild broken body parts, that one is as
much compelled to jump on the bandwagon as to look for ways to break the spell.
In no time I was showing high school students You Tube clips of people printing
wrenches and building their own drones, recommending the book to friends and
colleagues, haranguing my wife with all I’d just learned of the singularity
that would transform the world in the next twenty years.
I knew I had to be careful: There’s not much value in being easily
impressed. Abundance prints an
invigorating picture, but some problems lie beyond the scope of its discussion.
For example, the work that needs to be done requires engineering skills many
humans have no interest in acquiring. What happens when the unemployed billion
can’t find anything to do with all the leisure abundance will afford? What’s to keep us from winding up like Star Trek’s Borg –a real possibility when
people have internet access implanted in their brains, an eventuality the
authors wholeheartedly embrace? How long before we become the human batteries
powering the matrix? And won’t considerations such as these inspire
anti-evolutionary fundamentalist conservatives to even greater acts of rage and
sabotage?
Well, there’s a lot to be done. This is a fight where if we
win we win big and if we lose we lose it all. Diamandis and Cotler say it’s a
fight we can win. Sticking with the amygdale-serving negativity of assault
rifles, government gridlock, incarceration nation, zombie Apocalypse, CNN and
fiscal austerity is more than a little like paying attention to the wrong kind
of news and not having the faintest clue as to what’s needed to solve problems.
I’m going to continue monitoring our progress toward the singularity
because the very idea of it excites me. It flies in the face of Biblical
warnings about the Tower of Babel, the acceptance of suffering, and the poor
will always be with us. For that reason alone I think it’s pretty damned daring.
I’ll bring it to the students in my classes and scatter it here and there on
the internet. I’ll take care of myself so I can be around to see it through.
