Anthropology & Technology

The impact of technological advancements on human anthropology, our behavior, modality and methods of communication, is an interesting topic to ponder. How will the revolution in technology impact human's modes of relating and what are some of the implications to our lives?  In The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst & Miller 2006), the researchers examine how cell phone technology impacts Jamaicans lives and experiences specifically. It is grounded in the reality of everyday Jamaican life, "The Cell Phone" succeeds as "...a study of the changes that document and demonstrate what a cell phone can turn into in the hands of a Jamaican, and what a Jamaican can become when they have their hands on a cell phone.”. This is an important piece of scholarship for anyone interested in the impact of technologies on people, cultures and societies and serves as an interesting point of view in considering the implications of other technologies and their impact on all people, regardless of their wealth or education.

While the Cell Phone certainly has made major impacts on human behavior, culture and life, it is but a slice of a more daunting and radical change which is upon us all. For how life and communication was impacted by the portable phone will pale in comparison to more impactful technologies. See the following video to understand at least one example: that of our behavior, interaction and communication methods among each other through the use of global digital networks and computers: http://www.youtube.com/v/6gmP4nk0EOE&rel=1 .

Perception - Our Beliefs of What "Is" and How Shift Happens

Adequately conveying to people invested in the past the tremendous and real change that is occuring in the world today and the implications of the revolution is challenging. It is one thing to generally express the concept of rapid change and another to codify the reality of this change in a manner which people can grasp. Thus consider the following presentation and perhaps you will be more prepared and able to grasp the shift and just some of the implications of the revolution: http://www.youtube.com/v/ljbI-363A2Q"

The Age of Transcendence and the Revolution

The dawn of a new era in human history is upon us all. Perhaps more so than any previous era that inspired historians to give it a name signifying its import, looking back hundreds of years, thousands of years, say some, this new era may be unmatched in the scale of its effect on humankind. Numerous credible authors have testified in their writings that something this big is happening. Francis Fukuyama declared the end of a major cultural era in his famous and controversial essay “The End of History” (1989). A little later, Science magazine editor David Lindley foretold the demise of the Holy Grail of physics—the general unified theory— in The End of Physics (1993). The next year, British economist David Simpson claimed that macroeconomics had outlived its usefulness\ in The End of Macroeconomics (1994). Then, science writer John Horgan ticked off legions of scientists with his provocative book The End of Science (1997). That same year, Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine told us in The End of Uncertainty (1997) of an imminent broad-reaching shift in scientific worldview that will make much of what stands as scientific truth today scientific myth tomorrow.

So many endings must mean so many new beginnings. Since the start of the last decade, virtually no major field of human endeavor has been spared from predictions of its ending, perhaps not literally, but certainly in terms of past conceptualizations of its nature. The world of business is no exception. It is experiencing far reaching changes in conceptualizations of its fundamental purposes and how companies should operate. Indeed, looking at the magnitude of change in the business world, it is not overreaching to suggest that an historic transformation of capitalism is underway.

Barely a dozen years ago as the Internet was going mainstream few could have credibly predicted the scale of this transformation. This era of epochal change is referred to in the book Firms of Endearment as the Age of Transcendence . The dictionary defines transcendence as a “state of excelling or surpassing or going beyond usual limits.” Associated with this Revolution is shift in the zeitgeist of contemporary society; for example, Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco says, “The most striking feature of contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence.” This craving for transcendence could be playing a strong role in the erosion of the dominance of scientifically grounded certainty, which has marked the character of worldviews in Western societies since the dawn of modern science. In recent times, subjective perspectives based on how people feel have gained greater acceptance. More and more, it is acceptable to see life through a worldview shaped more by how individuals feel than by how or what the external world thinks.

We stand at what physicists call a bifurcation point; an interregnum between the poles of death and birth or rebirth, when an old order faces its end and a new order struggles to emerge from its fetal state. At such times, the future becomes more uncertain than usual because events within the time and space boundaries of a bifurcation point have infinite possible outcomes. This is why Valentine declares, “The future is disorder,” but challenges us to join efforts to bring forth a new order with the yeasty lure, “It’s the best possible time to be alive when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”

Humankind is entering a realm where no one has gone before. Its landscape is as unfamiliar to us as the world that we have known until now would be to a time traveler from the eighteenth century.

How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being While No One Saw It Coming - The Nature of Revolution

Sometimes something happens that almost no one sees coming. The mainstreaming of the Internet was such an event. When MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte was asked in 1994 why he had not foreseen the coming ubiquity of the Internet he lamely responded, "The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time - you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing." This is but one example of numerous in human history where the most knowledgable among us are unaware of the obvious as it happens before their eyes. They are too familiar with the present and thus blind to the future and could not see what was really happening, nor understand its implications.

Paul Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest describes another and potentially even greater event in terms of humankind's future: a massive social transformation of government and business quietly taking place beyond the awareness of most people. The stealthy nature of this event is hinted in the book’s subtitle, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming.

Hawken takes the reader on a journey through time, starting out many centuries ago, to show how we got to where we are today in terms of how we are dealing with major societal problems, such as the beleaguered state of our natural environments.

 At times a reader might wonder why Hawken pauses in the journey he takes us on to talk about life centuries ago. However, in the end he pulls together threads harvested from multiple spools of thought into a beautifully fashioned literary tapestry depicting humankind’s present situation on this planet.

This is yet another example of the revolution. Pay attention to what you may not be seeing and you may be the beneficiary of insights that will lead to better choices and decisions during the turmoil that is destined to embrace us all as the revolution moves ahead.

The Revolution Moves to Singularity

Futurist R. Kurzweil explains that capturing just .03% of sunlight falling onto the earth would satisfy projected human energy needs through 2030. The technologies for this solution exist and it is only a matter of time before the adoption of these and other new technologies will solve many challenges, like energy, which modern human civilization is facing. However, the implication of the dramatic evolution of technologies will result in even more compelling and revolutionary change that will impact humanity in ways presently unimaginable to most. Humanity will inevitably move beyond its biological constraints and this evolution, termed by some as the new age of Singularity, will soon be upon us all.

An objective historical account of the exponential explosion of technologies shows what has occured in just the past few decades: the paradigm shift rate is doubling every ten years. For example it took a half century to adopt the telephone and only eight years to adopt the cell phone. These principals are based on indirection; learning from the past and adopting this learning into the next stage of change: it is the nature of evolution. A good example is in biological evolution, where RNA and DNA took billions of years to develop, while the Cambrian explosion took but 10 Million years to occur. As shown in nature, we cannot think of technological change in a linear fashion: it is logrythmic and exponential.

This thinking and the depth of research and understanding which substantiates these trends and ideas is represented thoughtfully by Ray Kurzweil and can be viewed on TED.

Singularity

Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence.  It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like “The Matrix”), "experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”),  and vastly enhanced human intelligence.  The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.

And that’s the Singularity?

Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle.  We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it.  That will mark the Singularity.
The date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045.  The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. 

Why is this called the Singularity?

The term “Singularity” is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing?  Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity. The dynamics leading to the Singularity are at the root of the emerging human revolution which we are only begining to see the signs of today.