Celebrating The Future

In this day and age, we have already achieved modernization with its peaks and troughs. We are entering a new era of more complexities and challenges that can now be easily resolved with a new intelligence in another form.

TECHNOLOGY RISING:

With the rise of technology as an essential form of service it brought vast changes to the world both constructive and destructive. Human inventions can ease burdens, uplift suffering, and even bring new forms of beauty into the world and to balance it out it can also create war as to what weapons are made for. 

MAN’S EGO and THE DEVALUATION OF HUMAN THOUGHT:

Man with all his pride, glory and ambition keep on trying to duplicate the brain’s functions and abilities to keep up and top what nature has given us that resulted to the rise of human-like thinking machines. Now we are still the highest form of beings but in a short time scale what is regarded as the Homo Sapiens race will be replaced by the Machine Sapiens by which are created by the human race itself. 

Children do research via internet, the problem-solving, the researching and connection making is performed not by the child but by the machine. The trend nowadays when you would like to learn something is to “google it”. Then there are websites like stumbleupon, pandora, snipsnap, and various sites that offer recommendations and suggestions to users by prediction of users’ taste and preferences for an efficiency and less brain in part of the human. In a text-editing software like MS Word, what we users do is merely input mountain of text and rely on the Auto-spell and Grammar check for proof reading and corrections. These in its simple forms are a degradation of human thinking.

We have been accustomed to the use of technology thus Artificial Intelligence, and by allowing that intelligence to teach us, to learn from, to benefit from and to grow up with, it is most likely that in time it is slowly reshaping the concept of a person’s ability to think on its own. As we think of people more like machines, just as how we think machines are like people we are degrading the ability of human thought and thinking. 

THE NEXT AGE (THE POST-HUMAN AGE):

Everyday in the market new forms of technologies are introduced, from smart phones to human machine interface design truly there is rapid growth and improvement in every waking hour. With the continuous process of innovation and inventions, it is not far that progress itself will lead to the creation of an even more intelligent entity. 

“The introduction of human intelligence is a pivotal event in the history of the planet. Evolution’s grandest creation -human intelligence- is providing the means for the next stage of evolution. This “next stage” was created by human intelligence itself, an example of the exponential engine of evolution using its innovations from one period (human beings) to create the next (intelligent machines). The next milestone will be technology creating its own next generation without human intervention.” - Ray Kurzweil , The Age of Spiritual Machines.

A disgrace is face front to our human capabilities when that “next stage of evolution” takes place. But should we be more proud for the accomplishment of our creations to create a new era? I doubt it, this phenomenon is different from a mentor beaten by his discpile...for this student itself is built with genuine human intelligence compared to those of the machines. 

Let alone it is probable that the ultraintelligent machine will be the last invention mankind can create 

What we will be seeing someday is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture. Those days in the future we might regard the ever knowing human intelligence to be in line with the level of that of a chimp. For now we are still ahead than any machines built today but years and centuries later that very crown we are proud of might be a case of obsolote mainframe computers that was used a long time ago. The extinction of the human race is at risk in line with the coming of the new age and thus we reap the consequences of our own makings for we are the initiators of our own destruction. What we do today there will be ramifications for mankind’s competitiveness, cruelty and ambition but one of the solutions scientists have in mind is to meet those machines with a compromise by setting up rules or physical confinement so that these machineries can be used safely and with precaution. 

Image: Tron