Volume 2, Issue 4
4th Quarter, 2007


A New Opportunity to Teach and Succeed

Jack Harney

Page 2 of 5

The Disconnect

Great minds past and present appear to share a common trait. In comparison to Humanity in general, they spend a significant amount of time not only working on their “discovery”, but imaging what life will be like when it is implemented. No doubt Thomas Edison “saw” the world aglow with many thousands of light bulbs long before it worked. Bill Gates spoke about the infancy stage of personal computers in the 1990s because he had already imaged astounding future applications. There is no question that Martine Rothblatt and Ray Kurzweil have very strong images of what life will begin to be and eventually evolve into after the Singularity. Already engaging in the simulation of mock trials that may determine the legal status of future Cyber Humans is both brilliant and a sterling example of this. Imaging, one of the most powerful and unique traits of Humans, has always been a critical component of any advancement. Great minds actually experience a virtual reality of the future of their coming discoveries. A good part of their daily thinking is spent in this “Second Life” existence. 

second life

Image 2: SecondLife

However, as time goes on, all of us futurists find it more and more difficult to live in the present. It’s not that we don’t attend to our daily responsibilities and live up to our commitments. But over time this future thinking can affect even some of our closest relationships. We find ourselves less able to spend time with the people who were involved in the earlier stages of our life as we seem to have less and less in common with them. We even suffer estrangements with old friends and family members. I received an email from a Transvision attendee who remarked that he was enjoying our communications about the conference because he is unable to discuss such issues with his girlfriend. As we see the future more and more clearly, we work harder each day to bring it about. We take on an attitude that it almost already exists and find ourselves spending more and more time with other people who see that same future, and less and less time with those who can’t, or worse won’t image that.

While this transition finds us happily in the company of like minded and inherently more intelligent people, there is nothing elitist about it. For most of us in this mind set, we are driven to not only create advancements, but to achieve them in order to make the world a better place for all Humans. Rather than Hollywood’s old stereotype of the mad scientist, wanting to benefit the world appears to be a shared trait amongst the most gifted of Humans.

A not-so-good side effect of these changing relationships is a communications disconnect between those creating worthwhile advancements and the mass of Humans who will be affected by them. In the past, we picture Galileo and other scientists unable to eat or sleep as they narrow down their work to a point of it being ready to be announced. We picture Darwin in almost a monastic existence getting ready to publish his On the Origin of Species before he thrusts it upon an unsuspecting public and turns the meaning of life upside down. As advanced thinkers today pursue their goals, they gradually find themselves at meetings and conferences with a good number of the same presenters and attendees where the same question keeps coming up at open forum moments, “How can we get more people to understand what this work means?” The audience for their writings, while experiencing sometimes excellent growth, is relatively small in terms of the very large numbers of Humans who will eventually be affected by their new discoveries and their implementations.

This is not a problem when the result of the work is the proverbial better mousetrap that will be accepted with open arms. It is a problem when the advancement involves what appears to be a requirement to accept new concepts and values that appear to reject very old established ones. The problem magnifies exponentially when those who feel threatened by these advancements are the hierarchies of dogma based religious beliefs who have both huge financial and political power. We are all well aware of the fates of intellectual giants like Galileo and Darwin and their sufferings at the hands of the religious right. Even now, 400 years after Galileo we have pockets of religious beliefs that still deny heliocentricism and 150 years after Darwin, a new “Creation” museum in Kentucky is depicting two dinosaurs walking on to Noah’s Ark. The problem with the disconnect in these two examples is that neither large numbers of people or at least the more powerful ones who could affect the success or failure of accepting their new science were ever pre-programmed to at least be in an open minded position. In Galileo’s case, his attempt to explain his discovery was mistakenly seen as an attempt to re-interpret scripture…the no no of all no nos.

In more recent times, we have the evidence of the huge reactions on all levels of religious and governmental organizations to our little friend, Dolly, the cloned sheep.

dolly
Source: Wikipedia, Roslin Institute
Image 3: Dolly and newborn

The same experience applied when it was clear that we are on the verge of major breakthroughs in stem cell research. A whole host of new laws and limitations came out of the woodwork to protect what political and religious leaders saw as a dangerous encroachment on what God’s rights are and the need to re-establish our less significant position and accompanying Human limitations to God. All this furor and in both cases, each of these accomplishments hold promise of some fairly immediate positive, medical advancements. No matter. We still live in times when what may benefit Humans will struggle to advance or even be quashed when religious dogma may be endangered.

In the case of the coming Singularity, the potential benefits speak to a transfer from a physical state to a cyber state that promises diversity, unity and joyful immortality. On the website of the Terasem Movement, a description of this new Transhuman form purports that, through exponential growth in knowledge we will become increasingly omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent and as a result will experience a realization of ourselves as the age-old benevolent God. Excuse the play on words, but this is going to scare the living heaven out of all the wrong people. The Singularity may be near, but it may never arrive if it becomes an outlaw, branded as such by the religious establishment who will likely be supported by accompanying political legislation.

 

 

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