Dystopian Evolution
A Dystopian Evolution
A friend of mine recently commented that Covid-19 offered some silver linings for society and humanity and indeed the planet.
He argued that face to face conferences had not only lost their potency but permanently lost their place in society. He argued that face to face meetings and particularly face to face conferences and training were not as effective as online ones. Further, they involved large amounts of unnecessary travel.
He noted how university courses are now available entirely online, and increasingly, the need to meet face to face will phase out. He suggested that this was something we should embrace, if for no other reason than to save the planet and avoid extinction. That’s a pretty compelling reason, I guess.
He had a point, and he might be right, so I asked myself whether we should fight this future or embrace it? Were my inclinations to say “NO!” I want to meet people merely a Luddite approach to an inevitable end or perhaps superfluous to the inevitable progress of time?
I think not. Viewing the “new normal” as a Utopia to embrace is to embrace the film, the Matrix (Warner Bros., 1999). The way this will end is with humanity locked in living coffins, communicating only in thought and only with those within our networks. Nature and probability are on my side, I think, with this argument.
Consider Beehives. Are the bees acting independently? Or are they individually working solely for the benefit of the hive and the Queen? As I understand it, the Queen sends out feromones that trigger each bee to perform a primary function for the hive. To scout for flowers; To collect nectar; to be an aircraft controller for the returning bees. Not much freewill in a beehive.
Now consider the new normal that has allowed humans to connect — in one regard — much more efficiently without moving. We connect through wifi-tentacles to hundreds or perhaps thousands of people. We get sensory input, can make decisions, and with the help of A.I., we are beginning to make great strides in productivity. It is truly the age where man and machine start to meld.
I want you now to look at those WIFI Tentacles and compare them not to the bee analogy, but to compare them to a neuron (nerve cell). Neurons are the building block of human intelligence. They consist of a nucleus, which is surrounded by what is called a “Soma”.
The nerve cell has a dangling Axon, a tentacle-like set of arms. The Axon can be 100 times longer than the rest of the cell, linking through electrical pulses. The axon allows it to communicate with 10 to 10,000 other neurons (Russell & Norvig: “artificial intelligence a modern approach).
That seems quite a LOT like the new normal to me and might be where humanity is headed if we don’t get up and meet each other face to face.
As remote communication develops, we will travel less and less. During the lockdown, a local football coach reportedly died due to blot clots in his legs after not leaving his computer games for months (Mirror). I don’t know how true that is, but I suspect that sales in “Fortnight”, a multiplayer online game, skyrocketed during the lockdown.
So now we are moving less, and the machines control more of our personal ecosystem. We knew it was here with mobile phones taking up most of our waking hours, but now we know we don’t even have to leave the house! We know from the first world’s obesity crisis that 95% of us will (given a choice) NOT do the exercise we need, even if we know that this is a decision that will guarantee a terrible death (Dr Norman Lazurus, The Lazurus Strategy). So now we know that within a few generations, if not in THIS generation, we’ll start to build that cocoon. Amazon and Just Eat can deliver food. Even this will be increasingly done via machines. The people designated as “workers” can be the 5% that do exercise when not required.
In parallel, we have considerable leaps in V.R. Headsets as well. Have you been to one of the new V.R. gaming parlours? The technology is there, and it is quite astounding. It will be the must-have gadget for Christmas 2021 if it isn’t in yours already. Now you probably don’t need a whole house to live in, let alone a garden. This is convenient because already 54,000 office blocks in the U.K. alone have already been turned into housing (BBC Panorama) and that is a fraction of the number about to be left empty. Already there’s talk of converting these to communal housing and if a low-cost solution can be found that is better than the Panorama video, we could solve our housing crisis as well!
So far it’s all looking very efficient, very doable and possibly all too likely.
So now, vast numbers of us are living in a bubble-like room. We get all the stimulation we need from those wifi-tentacles to friends we never met. We get food and supplies delivered, and whilst we are free to go out, 95% of the time, given a choice, we choose not to do so. Even though we know, it will kill us.
At some point, our bubble might even reach the status symbol equivalent of “what car do you drive”? The cars may be mostly gone, replaced by the virtual world that can take us anywhere, anytime.
That capsule looks a LOT like the soma on the neuron, the sack surrounding the nucleus of a nerve cell.
Now our wifi tentacles start to turn into a cog in an uber-brain. A hive, if you will.
It’s all a somewhat dystopian evolution. So I think we better keep the bars open. Keep the theatres alive. Learn face-to-face where we can. At least until the next generation. They’ll probably see things through rose-tinted V.R. headsets.
