Connected
From stone tools to the internet, from the internet to the metaverse
At Christmas 2022 I started to play with ChatGPT for the first time. In a few days, I wrote a science fiction story with it and blogged about my experiences. Few of my family and friends knew what I was doing. “It’s just some nerdy thing he does,” they probably thought. Less than half a year later, almost every one of them was using ChatGPT on a daily basis.
Technology has the unique ability to move extremely fast and slow at the same time. It feels fast because in the 80s, everyone was using personal computers in no time. In the ’90s, the Internet took off in a blink of an eye. A decade later, smartphones and in the previous decade, social media. Recently, AI joined these technologies by storm.
At the same time, it feels slow. Artificial intelligence is a scientific field with origins in the 50s of the 20th century. Long developing outside the public eye. It now had its breakthrough moment, but other fields are still just a promise. We don’t have fully autonomous cars, intelligent robots, and a metaverse. But even though the technologies seem fast at their breakthrough, the real progress is in the decades before. When it still feels slow.
From science fiction to our daily lives
The book 1984 is a dystopian fiction published in 1949 by George Orwell. In the story, everyone is under mass surveillance. It was specifically set in the year 1984 as that was far enough in the future, but still close enough for the reader to imagine. In the decades that followed the publication, lots of parallels can be found between the book and the Cold War. Still, many concepts in the book, like “big brother” and the “thought police”, weren’t understood that literally.
Since 1984 when computers and the Internet became a common thing this slowly changed. 2024 is a year when George Orwell’s 1984 is a reality. Only think of Snowden’s exposed the mass surveillance program by the NSA or the way China is monitoring, shame and rate their citizens. It feels logical that also other dystopian science-fictional worlds from Snow Crash, VR Player one and the Matrix slowly will become a reality in the decades after their publication.
But in reality, the impact of technology on our lives is a million times more nuanced than science fiction can portray. Yes, every technology mentioned, from computers to AI, has its downsides, but at the same time it has given humanity tremendous freedom and power to the individual.
The Varian rule
Could anyone imagine in 1784 that a virus could take over the world? Yes, because history has shown events like the Black Death and other pandemics. Could they also imagine that everyone would stay away from each other and stay at home for years? Sure. But could they imagine staying home and still being able to communicate with family and friends around the world? Unlikely. A Zoom call where people can talk and see each other even though they are on five different continents would feel like magic.
What is happening here is something called the Varian Rule. At first, people find things unimaginable. Maybe a few geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci can imagine and invent things, but to most it seems magical. Then, after a while, science fiction writers can write stories around new technological concepts, while scientists work on the basic science.
At some point, these technologies become available to the super rich. The Varian Rule says, “A simple way to predict the future is to look at what rich people have today; middle-income people will have the equivalent in 10 years, and poor people will have it in another decade”. Now your grandmother or someone in a poor country are using a smartphone, in two decades they will also use AI.
The last generation
In the game and Netflix series “The Last of Us,” the writers imagine a world taken over by a fungus that grows uncontrollably like a parasite on humans. Coming just a few years after Covid-19, it’s easy to imagine a virus, fungus, or other natural phenomenon growing uncontrollably and rapidly until it affects us all.
With such natural phenomena, we can apply the evolutionary laws of natural selection. Or, as Darwin put it, “survival of the fittest”. Technology behaves similarly to an organism like a virus spreading throughout the world. At present, our world is already covered with technology dust. Dust made of zeros and ones. Made of data.
The rules and laws of technology play a little differently because they are often less constrained by resources. For example, Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and Director of Engineering at Google, has proposed the “Law of Accelerating Returns”. This law suggests that technological change is exponential rather than linear, meaning that each new generation of technology builds on the previous one at an accelerating rate.
At school, we learn nothing about these things. We learn about Shakespeare, about Darwin, and about Martin Luther King. We may even learn how to apply technologies like Microsoft Windows or Office. What we don’t learn is about how technology impact our everyday lives, and controls the direction of the world. And like Kurzweil law, the impact is greater with each generation.
This story is about you
When I was young, we had one of the first personal computers at home. It was in a separate room, and I was not supposed to touch it. I didn’t know what to do when the black screen appeared anyway. A world opened up when the Internet became the World Wide Web. I could surf to any page, write about any topic, and (illegally) download any music I wanted.
As a teenager, I couldn’t believe that ‘old and wise’ people didn’t react to it. Why weren’t there any new laws, why wasn’t this technology used to its max? Later I found out that those ‘old and wise’ people just didn’t understand the technology. The same thing happened with smartphones and social media, where the response from lawmakers and schools came years later. That’s why I’m writing this series about technology.
The world and our lives are covered with zeroes and ones. Can we understand our history, where we invented the first stone tools, to the Internet? And can we understand the future, where the internet evolves and incorporates other technologies like crypto, IOT and AI? How do we go from the internet to the metaverse?
This isn’t a story about emerging technologies. It’s about you. How everything in your life gets digitally connected. How you find your way through a sea of zeroes and ones.
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