Showing posts with label singularity. Show all posts
2011 was a pretty good year at the box
office. Despite the industry claiming that their world will soon end
because of piracy, ticket sales do not lie. Harry Potter 7 Part 2
made $169 million in a weekend, the highest of all time before The
Avengers. Transformers, Twilight, Pirates of the Caribbean, all had
blockbuster years at the box office.
And each one of them got their ass
kicked by video games.
Harry Potter 7 Part 2 was the highest
grossing film of 2011 and made huge waves for having a $92 million
opening day. Modern Warfare 3 made $400 million in 24 hours. In five
days it passed $750 million, a mark Harry Potter took nearly two weeks to pass. Transformers 3 came in second place at the box office
and over its entire run made $350 million in the United States. Elder
Scrolls V: Skyrim made $450 million in five days.
And video games are terrible.
Video games lack so much creativity
that Mario is still a best seller. Imagine if you went to the movies
and Marty McFly was having another grand adventure with Doc Brown.
That's what video games are like. For those who don't understand the
reference that's because Back to the Future came out in 1985, a
few years AFTER everyone's favorite plumber.
But it doesn't matter. Because video
games are the future.
And it is only going to continue.
With the exponential growth rate of
technology there is no doubt that video games will soon dominate our
conscious lives. Currently it takes a certain kind of dedication to
become truly entrenched in a game. There are far too many barriers to
immersion for most people to sink into a game. Controllers can be
foreign to non-gamers, screens can't replace real life.
But the barriers will fall away.
As time passes, technology will become
easier to use, more user friendly and more connected to every day
tasks. Just last week Google patented an infrared ring that users
wear on their finger to control interfaces on augmented-reality
glasses. Microsoft is releasing the Kinect for PC this year, which
will likely replace the keyboard with swipes of the hand and voice
commands. If those are not two sentences out of a sci-fi novel, I
don't know what is.
Gaming, as it's known today, is the
real future. Just as it only took a few years for smart phones to
become the majority of cell phones on the market, the gaming
revolution will happen faster than we can understand. It won't happen
when a gaming company invents a new technology, or programs a new
graphics engine so that monsters look awesome. Those things will
already exist. True innovation isn't about invention but combination.
The transformative moment is not
Google's Project Glass or Microsoft's Kinect or any single idea. The
transformative moment is when a game is released that combines so
many different elements that it becomes more than a game, it becomes
a way of life. At first there will be a relatively small group, as
there always is. Then that group expands. What's going to be
different about the video game revolution is that it will have no
reason to stop expanding.
The common quip is, "That sounds
like something out of a sci-fi movie." No arguments here, there
are countless books, essays, shorts and movies that all predict a
similar kind of future. What may be unclear is that books and essays
and movies are just ways of bringing imagination into reality. When
technology advances to the point when an all-encompassing "game"
is feasible, all those writers and filmmakers and all the fans of
those writers and filmmakers will become the first wave of gamers.
Science fiction is the imaginative precursor to manifestation in the
physical reality.
A new book will soon be released by TED
that discusses the Hybrid Reality that will exist for the next
generation. Life will be lived as a hybrid, taking place in both the
physical environment and the virtual one. Robotics will continue to
take on greater workloads in the physical environment
while humans become more involved in the virtual worlds we create.
According to Hybrid Reality, "what human civilization needs more
than anything is not greater IQ or EQ, but TQ: technology quotient."
The ability to adapt and use advanced technology.
Which makes for an interesting debate
between those currently using technology and those who are out of the
loop or shunning it entirely. If you're reading this then chances are
you fall into the former camp, and my position should be fairly
obvious. With time the differences will become even more stark.
Since birth there are those who have been upping their technology
quotient, preparing, in a way, for the video game revolution. Now
that the future looks so bright there is only one thing to do...
Keep gaming.
This piece is also available at gridlockmagazine.com. You can read the story here, but I humbly request that you first click this link. That way my boss knows people like this stuff.
*~*~*~*~*
A century is a tiny fraction of time on
the cosmic scale, yet to human beings the last century has produced
more technological innovations than the previous thousand. Even the
poorest individuals living in Western countries have technology that
would make them gods to previous generations. Over the last 100 years
we have spread industrialization to every corner of the globe,
traveled to the moon and connected billions of individuals through
the internet. However, some are not content with the work of our
forefathers. Some are asking what's next.
Futurists are individuals who study
past and current trends in order to make predictions about the
future. Last year TIME had a cover story on Ray Kurzweil- scientist,
inventor and author. The article discussed a coming technological
singularity, a moment in time when imagination instantly becomes
reality through technology. While Kurzweil is an important member of
this sub-section of our society predicting what the future has in
store, he is not alone.
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Jason Silva self-describes as a
filmmaker, futurist and epiphany addict. He has gained popularity
through numerous video shorts talking about the cross section of
science and art (vimeo.com/jasonsilva). He calls the shorts
"philosophical shots of espresso" meant to both enlighten
and inspire. Combining wondrous works of art with Silva's exuberant
delivery style makes watching the videos so engrossing that afterward
it is difficult to decide whether to stand up and cheer or
immediately find the next clip.
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THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY from Jason Silva on Vimeo.
When people think in historical terms
they often remember dates and events, maybe a Hollywood take on WWII
or the half-forgotten lecture of a grade school teacher. If, instead,
we looked at history from a cosmic point of view reality becomes far
more interesting. What you would see is the exponential decrease in
the lag time between human imagination and tangible existence.
Pharaohs dreamed of the pyramids but rarely lived to see them
completed. Today, a half-drunk college kid thinks of a social site
and five years later it is one of the biggest companies in the world.
Artists no longer wait for their work to be discovered years after
their death, but paint using iPads and upload it immediately to
dozens of communities around the globe. Silva says in another of his
videos, "right now the smartphone in your pocket is a million
times cheaper, a million times smaller and a thousand times more
powerful than a $60 million super-computer was in the 1960s. That is
a billion-fold increase in price, performance and miniaturization."
 |
| Let's keep our head in the clouds |
That understanding of past and present
events allows for, seemingly, radical predictions to be made about
the future. To futurists like Kurzweil and Silva the possibilities
are endless. Here are some ideas of what we are talking about:
In vitro meat: Grown not as an animal but specifically for human consumption. Genes would be regulated to increase desired qualities i.e. vitamins, amino acids, omega-3. Instinctively, we all know that our current rate of production is unsustainable. Most farm land goes towards growing corn that we feed to livestock. In vitro meat would end those types of problems.
Machine/Human combination: Already bones can be replaced with metal alloys, but soon we will have heart transplants that are cloned from our original DNA and then improved using nano-technology. This would allow for human life to be substantially lengthened. Eventually, bodies may become relics, the same way we look at suits of armor today.
Universal telepathy: Phone calls, texts and emails have begun this process. The fact that you are reading this article is evidence of a substantial form of telepathy. I have never spoken these words aloud to any living thing, yet you understand me regardless of distance, our relationship or even language. As the singularity nears, these processes we take for granted will be the stepping stones for communication that is so instantaneous it blurs the line between technology and magic.
Manipulation of biology: Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson said, “In the future, a new generation of artists will be writing genomes the way that Blake and Byron wrote verses." How today computer programmers write in a language most do not understand to create websites or videos or blogs, our children's children may do the same with biological genomes. One day humans may not only create life, but invent it.
This is the stage society is at. We
exist on the precipice of unimaginable change, and it is coming
faster than we can conceptualize. At this moment, every possibility
exists for our future. As a society we can choose numerous
directions, of war or peace, of regression or progression, of apathy
or creation. The Imaginary Foundation uses this motto, "To
imagine is to perceive many potential futures, select the most
delightful possibility, and then pull the present forward to meet
it."
Let's do that.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Special thanks to Jason Silva.
@jason_silva & thisisjasonsilva.com
On this week's podcast Rolando and I were discussing the changes Netflix is making as a company and when that morphed into talking about globalization and the positive/negative affects of technology, I kind of went off the deep end. This blog is to clarify my ramblings, and expand on a fun concept that my brain kicks around from time to time.
The gist of what I said:
“I think we are at the point in our
society when there is the possibility that we could develop a way to
connect our minds through the internet, or something like it. Not
just you sign in to facebook and look at what I'm doing, but your
mind is plugged into the internet, and my mind is plugged in and we
literally are one. We know everything there is to know about each
other. When/If that happens I think that is what religions are
striving for. To become one with all humanity.”
I didn't come up with this idea in a
vacuum (In fact, no idea comes from a vacuum, but that's a different
blog post). This is based on Ray Kurzweil's thoughts on the future of
technology and what he calls the singularity. The point when a
man-made machine becomes better than the human who created it,
mankind ceases to exist. He was on the cover of TIME a few months
back and there is a great story there.
Technology is on an exponential growth
curve. Each year it grows faster and faster because it is being
created with the previous years' new technology. Think of it this
way: Windows 8 OS isn't made on a computer running Windows XP, it's
made on a computer with Windows 7. Windows 9 will be made using
Windows 8. That's incredibly simplified, and not even entirely
correct, but it's a good example for what I'm trying to say.
Technology develops on an exponential curve because it uses the
newest possible technology to create the next greatest thing.
Our Smartphones today are thousands of
times more powerful than the first computer, and they fit in the palm
of our hand. As technology keeps progressing exponentially, why would
it be crazy to think that they could put our smartphones into our
brains?
For me, that's where things get interesting. The line between who you are as an individual begins to fade away. All of a sudden you can literally sign on, see, feel and interact with the internet using your own mind. The same way you can, right now, imagine and visualize signing onto your computer and reading a blog; in a few years you'll be able to actually do that. All in your own mind.
Using that technology, we create the
next tech. Which would be to completely remove any chip in our heads
at all. We could, theoretically, copy all the information on our
brains, everything that we are, and put it inside a computer.
Here comes the spirituality. Once you
do this, and I do this, and a guy in India does this, and a girl in
Russia... then we are connected. Not in a flimsy way that Facebook
tries to tell you are connected to all 500 of your friends. It would
be as if their minds were my mind. As if there was one collective mind
of all our combined knowledge, emotions and thoughts.
To me, that is Nirvana. That is heaven.
That is what it means to become one and achieve enlightenment.
This idea- or goal if you must think of
it that way- is talked about more often in Eastern religions than
Western ones. But just because we don't talk about it doesn't mean
it's not there.
Old Testament: Lev 19:18- Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
New Testament: Mark 12:31- And the second is namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
It doesn't say love your neighbor a
lot. Or love your neighbor like you love your children, or your wife,
or your best friend. It says love your neighbor as you love yourself.
Ask yourself who is the person you love
the most.
My guess is it's the person that you
know the best. That you've spent a lot of time with, because the more
you know a person the more love you have for them.
Now to bring it all back. Imagine this
world I'm talking about when minds can be shared. Not pieces of a
mind, or the flashy outsides that we display publicly. Everything a
person is. You would know them exactly as much as you know yourself.
If that happens, how could there be
anything but an overwhelming amount of love for one another?
That's a good intro. I'll expand
another day.
Thanks for reading.
One love.