Hypnos and Thánatos

Sleep and his Half-brother Death: Musings on a cyber future...

On Saturday night my wife and I met up with an old friend in Cape Town, at a restaurant that we had frequented over the years. While we chatted and caught up on each other’s lives, we couldn’t help watching a group of early twenty-somethings with some bemused interest.

There were six of them sitting together, oozing trendiness from the tops of their spiky-gelled heads to their custom ‘kicks’ (sneakers or takkies). Though they were sociably huddled together on two leather couches, they were completely oblivious to one another.

With faces illuminated by ghostly pale LCD glows, they were largely immobile save for random convulsive hand twitches, being completely absorbed by the laptops in front of them. Each was involved in their own little cyberworld – one was downloading music, another tweeting on Twitter and so on. None of them even ordered a drink the entire time we were there, let alone spoke to one another.

We wondered why they even bothered to get dressed up and leave their homes in the first place? Perhaps some latent desire for actual human company compelled them, but, at the last, they were unable to part from their umbilical connections to the Net.

Being fascinated by long-term trends I wondered where this is heading. When I think of the massive technological leaps I have witnessed in computing, and my own long-standing love affair with computers, I’m certain it will be a stranger world than we can imagine, but with some vague similarities. To illustrate how far we’ve come in such a short space of time, a little trip down memory lane is required...

In the beginning...

About twenty five years ago, after saving money I earned working after school in a video store (one that stocked Beta, Philips and VHS video tapes) I bought my first computer. It was a marvel of personal computing - a sleek little black Sinclair ZX Spectrum, boasting all of 16K of RAM.

It plugged into an ordinary TV set, and you could program it in BASIC. You saved your data onto cassette tapes, which you played via a normal tape recorder. The original 1982 advertising boasted it’s ‘high speed load and save capability’ as being 16K in just 100 seconds, and ‘the ZX Spectrum comes in two versions – with 16K, or a really massive 48K, of RAM’. When you loaded the files, by pressing ‘play’ on the tape recorder it played sqauwks and beeps just like you used to hear on computer modems when connecting to the internet. It was an amazing sound to me then - the primal screech of the future being born.

The plucky little computer processed data using 3.5Mhz and had an 8 colour display with resolution of 256x192 pixels, and had a built in speaker and integrated keyboard. It weighed around 550g and was only 23cm by 14cm in size.

There were even a few computer magazines available, which came complete with pages and pages of BASIC code, which, if you painstakingly typed it in and recorded it on a cassette, you then got to play a full game in resplendent, clunky graphics and beepy sound effects. If you mistyped just one character, you could spend hours checking for the typo before you got to play your new game. Sometimes there was an error in the magazine itself, which would be really frustrating. On the other hand, you could fiddle with the code to make your games do some offbeat things – kind of a prehistoric cheat code or hack.

Friends would record copies of their games, as well as stuff they had made themselves and then get together to swop tapes and stories with each other. (I was really proud of the little program I made which produced randomized coloured circles that got increasingly larger on your screen, while it played a little tune.) These meetings all took place in the real world, as email and the internet were virtually unknown, and cell phones were something you saw on a Star Trek movie!

So where are we headed?

In the near future, neural interfaces will mean that we won’t just Twitter about what we’re doing, we’ll Thunker about what we’re thinking. That however is just to kick it off...

We will create virtual worlds that defy the laws of physics, providing us with godlike possibilities. These cyberworlds will be so entrancing, so powerful and vivid that the real world will seem to be a poor, primitive reflection. We will become ever-more reluctant to use our frail physical bodies in an environment that will be viewed as increasingly alien and hostile, with its frightening possibilities of illness, injury and death.

As machine intelligence develops, we could choose to create our own perfect artificial companions, and shun the unpredictable motivations, desires and needs of other human beings altogether. Many of these AI’s would reside entirely in cyberspace.

Apart from creating artificial sentient beings, we will also use this technology to divest ourselves from our physical bodies, achieving immortality in the process. Groups of us may choose to merge our collective consciousnesses to create super-beings – meta-organisms, dedicated to particular avenues of thought, interests and research. Periodically these might split via a sort of cyber-meiosis to create separate, but related beings, much like scientific disciplines form today. Hybrid human-AI beings will emerge with vastly alien characteristics.

Many of our biological survival requirements will become obsolete – air, water, nutrients, gravity, warmth. Energy will be the key factor, and vast amounts of it will probably be required to power our cyber worlds. The planet’s surface might be abandoned for deep, geologically-stable subterranean vaults powered by energy from the Earth’s core. Colonies may take to space itself, not necessarily in the traditional sense of exploring or colonising the universe, but for efficient energy and resource collection.

Questions...

As we removed ourselves from the physical world, how would we treat the needs of other terrestrial life forms – for instance would we care about pollution, conservation, the environment?

Would we retain our emotional capacity, or would these be replaced by selective e-motions, eliminating the ‘deadly sins’ that shackle us but also make us human?

As completely different realities could be created limitlessly, would wars end? Would there be the need to fight wars over resources, ideologies, religions? If so, what would these wars look like – would they even take place in the physical world?

If we existed in cyberspace, would we continue to evolve? If so, and we created multiple realities, would we evolve into distinct species completely alien from one another?

Conclusion

Humankind’s long-standing preoccupation with transcendence - a theme found in even the most ancient of religions - could well be reaching a climax. As we stand at the threshold of making it a (virtual) reality, will we be able to retain our humanity?

References:

Second Life
Wikipedia (Hypnos)
Science Horizons
Wikipedia (ZX Spectrum)
Wikipedia (meiosis)
Principia Cybernetica Project
1982 ZX Spectrum advertising flyer