The Future is not what It used to be.....

Apparently “ignorance is bliss” - really? I think it's rather dull. If you want to future proof your future self you need to get smart!

Technology has been growing exponentially for some time now – according to Joel Garreau you can compress the total progress made in the last century on the basis of the current rate of development, into a time frame of about fourteen years – taking us to around 2014 to do this. As technology has been doubling in processing power consistently for over 50 years in increments of 12 – 18 months, generally known as Moore's Law – named after the co-founder of Intel Gordon E Moore. So if technology is going to continue with this trend – as many informed commentators insist – then it will take only 7 more years for it to double in capability again.... then 3 years.... 18 months … 9 months … The Singularity is upon us!

Change it can be quite upsetting if you aren't prepared for its occurrence. Ignorance is no defence. Unfortunately most people seem totally unaware of the potential consequences of exponentiality – in whatever form it comes – in fact I'm not even sure that most people even know what it means. Technological exponentiality is readily apparent if you have eyes to see it but because change is mostly incremental we tend not to notice it.

If we look at the process of miniaturisation that enables wonders such as the iPhone then we are measuring in nanometers (1000,000,000 = a billionth in a meter). For example a water molecule is less than one nanometer. A typical germ is about 1,000 nanometers. We can measure even larger things in nanometers, so a hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide. Until recently the size of a standard memory chip was about 100 nm – pretty small you huh. Well on September 1^st 2010 Rice University scientist announce a chip that is only 5nm in size! Not only that but it is a 2 terminal chip so consequently doesn't need to carry an electrical charge. Now that’s small! As Richard Feyman said, “there’s plenty of room at the bottom”. So miniaturisation is proceeding at quite a pace which has implications of greater speed and power. This will soon issue in the potential to embed miniature processors of phenomenal power in items such as you glasses, so that you can brows the web as you go about your every day business, or your clothing so as to monitor your body for those of us who have health issues.

Recently ETH Zurich proudly announced 108 GHz transistor – sound really good considering that most other groups only manage to produce speeds of 28 GHz. However, on the 3^rd of September 2010 UCLA researchers have fabricated a transistor with a whacking rate of 300 GHz!

So where is this all leading? My point is to give just a little flavour of how things are developing and how quickly. Most people intuit that the future is going to be much like the past, a steady linear progression. Well it just isn't like that. For example; say you had a pond with water-lilies in it. Apparently water-lilies can double their quantity in a day at the height of summer, so say you went on holiday for a week and on day one they ere only a measly 1% of the ponds volume, well, by the time you got back your pond would be overflowing – that's what exponentiality means. (1% becomes 2% becomes 4% becomes 8% -16% - 32% - 64% 128% = 7 incremental stages).Technological developments effect us in ways we are not even aware of – yet. However, these developments effect every aspect of our lives; being a Luddite is no answer to inevitable change. We need to know what is happening and embrace it if we are to fully benefit from it – get smart or become redundant.

Language ?

The value of a language is only as good as the breadth and depth of the concepts it can convey.

Language - what is it? Yeah stupid, everyone knows what language is! Well obviously its how we communicate. The current "bee in my bonnet" regarding this is that what we communicate (or fail to communicate) is conditional on how we do it, by the vocabulary we use - its grammar, syntax etc., and further the fact that the conceptual content of language is in many respects conditioned by its very structure. Further this is also made more complicated by our tendancy to assume the content of our concepts share the same meaning. I'm minded of the warning,

"those who speak, know not,

those who know, speak not."

The presumption that we implicitly understand, or that we have nothing to learn - it's all in the bag so to speak, is a lamentable human failing.

How long have humans been able to communicate? Well thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years - I don't know, I'm no specialist in this field. However, the earliest possible artwork yet discovered, the Venus of Tan-Tan comes from between 500,000 and 300,000 BCE, and the earliest known European cave paintings date to 32,000 years ago. The purpose of the cave paintings is not known. However, what is undeniable is that these wonderful creations demonstrate the essence of language - the formation of concepts!

Reality - the ultimate paradox

Quantum physics identifies an intriguing phenomena; sub-atomic particles can appear simultaneously in more than one place, and can be perceived both as a wave and as a particle.

"The idea of a particle is one which had to undergo serious rethinking in light of experiments which showed that the smallest particles (of light) could behave just like waves. The difference is indeed vast, and required the new concept of wave-particle duality to state that quantum-scale "particles" are understood to behave in a way which resembles both particles and waves. Another new concept, the uncertainty principle, meant that analyzing particles at these scales required a statistical approach. All of these factors combined such that the very notion of a discrete "particle" has been ultimately replaced by the concept of something like wave-packet of an uncertain boundary, whose properties are only known as probabilities, and whose interactions with other "particles" remain largely a mystery, even 80 years after quantum mechanics was established."

To my way of thinking this evidences that at its most fundamental reality is both an object and a process.

Language is a formalised way of objectifying reality. It does this by the formation of and development of conceptual constructs. It is through concepts we are able to abstract more and more elaborate interpretation as to what reality is. This objectification of reality is what makes language such an amazing tool in our quest to "understand". However, the problem with this conceptual methodology is that it often leads us astray - the Marshall McCluan effect is evident in that the medium not only informs us but conditions how we perceive our conceptions. The objectification of perceived reality tends to the mental formation of a modus of thought whereby we see phenomena in terms of things - which if allowed to dominate our way of thinking results in a sort of conceptual ossification that cramps our view - we forget about the fact that in reality phenomena changes. The essence of life is CHANGE, flow, evolution, becoming...... not STASIS. Thingness is contrary to life-processes when it becomes the dominant factor that conditions our perceptual/conceptual feed-back processes - its a very useful tool in our arsenal of concepts but when its done its job it needs putting back in the tool box.

Person Marshall McCluan

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