“We won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the 21st century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress (again, when measured by the rate of progress in 2000), or about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century.”
—Ray Kurzweil, futurist and trans-humanist
I don't feel safe in this world no more,
I don't want to die in a nuclear war,
I want to sail away to a distant shore
and make like an ape man.
-- the Kinks
One thing is clear: Toffler’s future shock was a tricycle ride. For, what Kurzweil is projecting is an inhuman pace in the most literal sense. How will primate anxieties ever comport this light-speed alteration of everything at once? Does anyone ever raise an apish arm in the lab to ask? Nor can I chastise Kurzweil for merely voicing a disembodied statistic. That would be an ad hominem attack (one day we will have to explain this logical fallacy to our artificial children). The humanist recognizes immediately that there is no human agent conducting this tempo. Technology (whatever the hell it is, no one really knows) is dictating the pace as a prelude to full-on control. We’ll get to declarations of war a little later. But am I alone in reading this statistic as technology’s gauntlet laid down: “We’re gonna run your monkey-asses over”?
-- Norman Ball
the-unrehearsed-flight-to-transhumanity
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