I like to fantasise about the future. We are in an extremely interesting epoch of human existence, one where it seems everything is hanging in the balance, and an extinction may be imminent. But to theorise about what will happen in the future, we must first look at the past. We must also understand the direction in which humanity is heading, and most importantly, it’s motivation.
So what motivates mankind? Is it the idea of living in peace and harmony where everyone is happy and has all the food, healthcare, free time that they desire? No. There is a fundamental driving force embedded within our DNA that we have absolutely no control over. It is the desire to evolve. It is the desire to compete and find the best of the best and ensure their survival. This can be seen in obvious behaviour patterns as well as some more interesting ones, like the way we worship celebrities, the way we try to control sex with religion and countless other examples. In fact if you look at almost any human behaviour, there is a way of relating it back to sex and survival of the fittest.
We currently live in an era where it would be possible to feed everyone, treat all basic illness, educate everyone to a decent degree and create efficient systems to allow us to all have a good deal of free time. This not what you see if you look around, and it is down to this drive to compete and dominate our fellow human beings. This desire is not strong in everyone, but it exists as a natural phenomenon in many.
So where we are heading is a situation in which we are forced to evolve. Into a situation where we are facing so much difficulty we must fight and find ways to separate the strong from the weak, not necessarily physically, but the adaptable from the redundant. More about this in my other article “Our Inescapable Nature”.
Sensing this apocalyptic event on the horizon, the powers that be have become paranoid, and have started investing in things that will ensure their survival. Surveillance, spaceflight, property in global-warming-and-uprising-safe countries such as New Zealand, artificial intelligence and robotics to reduce reliance on the human workforce and artificial reality to allow us to hide from the desert we are creating here on Earth.
There has been a huge increase in the investment and production of weapons in preparation for all the fighting that is believed to be on the horizon. There is an obvious increase in the armouring of the police in many countries with more advanced weapons and tools for crowd control. Things like automated vehicles can be seen as an advancement and a benefit but also have the interesting feature that they could be prevented from transporting someone to a protest site. Free internet for everyone in Africa and India from Facebook will come with the catch that it will be fully monitored and censored.
So technology can be seen to be progressing towards the same thing as the human race: “Judgement Day”. Any mainstream technological advancement we will see will not be purely for the betterment of mankind, but also for the protection of the elite.
The Good News
On the flip-side there is also a huge increase in technology (particularly on the internet) for allowing people to break out of these systems. Want an example? You are using one right now. Cryptocurrencies, anti-tracking tools, ad-blockers and the darknet are all things that have arisen to meet these intrusive technologies coming from big corporations and the government. There is also a boom in portable eco-homes for those of us who want to go into the forests and hide.
In this sense the war has already begun and we are actually coming towards the end of an ongoing battle that has lasted millennia. My prediction? Global warming will force mass-migration and a collapse of society. The rich will have escaped to islands, possibly artificial or even mobile and the remaining poor will go tribal. What do you think?
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