I READ THEREFORE I AM

 

I sometimes think that my reading is similar to people binge-watching TV.   I probably read at least thirty-five books a year, plus periodicals and articles that grab my attention.   There is never a time that I am not reading one or more books.    It is almost as if I am living in alternate worlds away from the realities of today. 

The human race is changing rapidly and I am not sure I like what I see.   Evolution throughout the animal world has required hundreds, if not thousands of years to achieve.   From African Eve to Homo sapiens required three million years.

 

 In the 1970s Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock.  He proposed that changes in our knowledge and environment took many decades, if not centuries, before human acceptance.  He predicted that humans were incapable of accepting rapid change, and historically that had been proven.   This was probably true until the advent of computers.  Changes had always occurred slowly and, as a result, human evolution moved slowly.

  That has speeded up.

Because of technology and cell phones, the synapses in human brains are being rewired.  Where once we were social animals communicating through personal interaction, now our social interactions are primarily through technological devices.  Instead of talking we text. Our friends are followers.  We are rapidly moving to a virtual world.   We are evolving, and this is happening over decades, not centuries.

 

 Genome editing (CRISPR), pioneered by Jinnifer Doudna, has suddenly advanced human technology to an era of designer humans.    The Nazis dreamed of this; but now it is a reality.   Through CRISPR it is possible to manipulate the gender, hair and eye color, build, etc of an embryo.   A master race?    The moral implications are reigning in human experimentation, but the technology is here.  It is only a matter of time.  Like nuclear energy, what can be used for human benefit in defeating disease, can also be used to the human detriment.

   

Artificial Intelligence is another technology we have a tentative handle on.   Humans are limited by their acquired knowledge and the speed of access.   Computer speeds and storage capacity is unlimited and increasing exponentially due to nanotechnology.   As we advance in quantum technology all the knowledge of the world could be stored on chips no bigger than the point of a pin.    Supercomputers are being designed to teach themselves (AI) and through the internet could acquire all knowledge in the world almost instantly.  By the end of this century, computers will control every aspect of human life: energy, transportation, architecture, medicine…  Will computers become the herder and we the sheep?

 

That is if we survive this century.

 

The United States has 5,428 nuclear weapons, United Kingdom 225, Russia 5,977, North Korea 20, China 350, India 160, Pakistan 165, Israel 90, and France 290.   

How long before some unstable person does the unthinkable: the megalomaniac Donald Trump had the nuclear launch codes.   Kelly called Trump an idiot, John Bolton called him a moron.  The head of the CIA said it was like dealing with a kindergartner and that Trump was unbriefable because of his short attention span – we dodged that bullet (or warhead.)   Now Putin is nuclear rattling.

 

The world is changing rapidly and the human race is evolving. 

Science follows science fiction and the worlds of Ray Bradbury and Michael Crichton may be the step-cousin of the future. 

 

The Ol’Buzzard