It is hard to envisage any world but our own; impossible to imagine a future where what matters now does not matter, where religion is simply part of history, and where concerns about equality, environment, and demography disappear or take on unimaginable forms.
Yet the 'post-human' generation - one which has been genetically modified and where mind and computer are interchangeable - that prosaic issues, those which limit rather than liberate, disappear and the world becomes a limitless universe of possibility.
Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs. Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past. Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.
Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly. It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification.
Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.
At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will, and to create worlds of their own choosing.
Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain. Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world.
Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.
Melanie Tripp had been immersed in partisan politics from a young age. Although born and bred of conservative parents in a conservative age, she like many of her generation was drawn to the social revolution of the Sixties. Action, involvement, and engagement were the only ways to validate one's existence in a complex world. To sit by, ignoring the problems of racial discrimination, the warming planet, the persistent glass ceiling, and the frustrated aspirations of gay men and women was tantamount to moral failure.
Melanie never lost her way, and while many of her colleagues treated the Sixties as a right of passage and nothing more, found comfortable sinecures on Wall Street and K Street, and left demonstrations and political activism far behind, she held the course. She had been a progressive's progressive, aligned with each and every cause in the canon. Progressivism and activist, confrontational politics had become her whole life.
So the idea of this virtual, artificially intelligent world disassociated from the reality she knew, was unthinkable. No matter what the platform, the vehicle, or the modality, life would always be about compassion, consideration, and doing the right thing.
Alfred Tomkins, Professor of Cybernetics And Brain Function at MIT had this to say about the coming post-human generation:
The implications of this engineered evolution are profound. First, we will no longer be hindered in our mental and spiritual evolution by the inefficient use of our brains. When a mind-computer interface (i.e. once decoded, human brain impulses will be able to be read by the computer and vice-versa) has been completed, the range of our mental capacities, however limited in the past, will be limitless. Imagine a Google search without a screen or keypad. The mind will not only have access to all information available in real time, but all past information that has been digitized.
Not only will we have access to this information, but we will be able to use it however we want. The distinction between fantasy and reality will disappear; and we will no longer be tethered by what is but what might be or what might have been.
In other words the ties that bind will be cut, and we - the human mind - will be free to explore both interior and exterior worlds. Old passions, concerns, issues will be irrelevant once the mind itself is freed from brick and mortar. At play in the fields of the Lord, suggested author Peter Matthiessen - a limitless, epiphanic journey through realms only dreamed of.
What most upset Melanie Tripp was the idea that in this brave new world individualism would reign. Anyone with access to the indefinably vast universe available to the human mind via a seamless link with the computer would need no one to travel with. However, relationships might be virtual but no less satisfying, and so perfectly created to fit one's personal, particular desires that any thoughts of who or what was left behind would immediately disappear.
Individualism, Melanie and her fellow progressives believed, was at the heart of the conservatism which was threatening to disassemble the carefully designed utopian visions they had long held. If advocates of AI and futurists like Alfred Tomkins were even partially right, then the world would be consumed by and subsumed within an artificial, unstructured, sybaritic world of fantasy. Human beings were not meant for such a rudderless, undisciplined chaos.
The American census form asks questions about political party affiliation, and there are only three choices - Republican, Democrat, and Other - but political scientists have often wondered why there was not a fourth category, 'Indifferent'. For as hard as it might be to believe in this divisive, contentious age that there could be anyone indifferent to the issues facing the world, there are a growing number - a number which will only increase as absorption into a virtual, cyber-mediated world becomes a reality.
The new world of virtuality, artificial intelligence, and complete interface with the electronic circuitry of of the computer will be fundamentally different - unrecognizable in fact - from that of today. It will not be just a modified version of life, but an unimaginably different one. Once the tethers from reality have been severed, all bets are off - religion, philosophy, economics, finance will mean nothing, or will be reconfigured in an artificially constructed, personal universe.
In order to accommodate this virtual permanence, the 'real' world will also change. Robotics of infinite variety will make, produce, harvest, process, and supply, all controlled by independently intelligent machines. The human body will be reconfigured and adjusted through recombinant DNA to adapt to this new environment. The human organism will fit the function of the new cyberspace.
Professor Tomkins went on:
It is quite normal for today's citizen to wonder what the world is becoming, so radically different it will be from anything they can imagine. The toll has been most telling on the progressive mind, so inextricably linked as it is to its particular notion of a socially utopian future. This notion, borne and raised in the days of Brandeis, Lafollette, and Gompers, has long since lost its relevance and intellectual elasticity. AI and virtuality are redefining 'utopia' and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the progressive vision
Melanie, who had always been a fierce advocate of progressive causes, a firebrand of righteous indignation, was now even more animated and eager. She marched in Iowa against the construction of AI data centers, in every silicon valley in the country against the further development of AI tools, on the steps of Congress to demand legislative action to prevent the pernicious spread of this destructive, existential threat.
The genie, however, is out of the bottle and there is no putting him back. AI will continue apace as will advanced genetic research, and the post-human generation is a certainty. Those already stoic and sanguine about the future, those with the intelligence and insight to be able to imagine a future with few of the road signs and mile markers of today, welcome the new world. Those penitential worriers like Melanie Tripp will never be able to see beyond the cant and confining canons of belief and will go fighting and struggling to oblivion.
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