The future is a mesh (thats not a spelling mistake - I know what a mess is!).
Many people for a long time now have been envisioning how the future evolution of humanity and technology will be a merged evolution. Perhaps not quite the same scenario of robo-wars and armageddon, yet a symbiotic meshing between the human biological organism and non-biological intelligence.
My own thoughts here refer to a stage where the Internet will become networked with the human. We already have an early stage of this - our devices and gadgetry perform this function. And the world around us is already wired with computer functioning. Most of the things we now commonly buy have computer chips either in the end product or in their manufacture. The world is already shared.
Now we need to upgrade. Everything has to become smarter. The world around us needs to come alive with intelligence: some call this ubiquitous computing; others refer to it as the mesh; some as the hypernet. Our environment will begin to speak with us, interact, and share information. It will begin to work for us in new ways. This is the new network currently under creation. This is the new Internet - version IPv6 (for Internet Protocol version 6).
There was a recent article in the Guardian newspaper called 'Bigger and better: the internet gets a sixth sense' which discusses this move, and helps to clarify its basic points. More are talking about it now - the new Web 2.0 is for the people, they say...
Yet we need this next stage: we need to become smarter; and more collectively smarter. We need to emulate Nature. She too is networked into an incredible web of active intelligence, of symbiotic patterns and relationships.
We need to share intelligence over bio and non-bio forms if we are to lift intelligence to its final conscious state.
1 comment:
Thanks Paul - always good to hear feedback.
In some ways I hark back to the ideas of Tielhard de Chardin and the noosphere: and more modern writers such as Peter Russell; which gives my techno viewpoints a 'global brain' with spirit slant.
I would recommend the techno-writer Mark Pesce here also.
I see the organic connection through biological principles of symbiosis (see work of Lynn Margulis) - whereby further evolution requires a form of cooperation that while seemingly a bio and non-bio relationship this may ultimately form a web of interrelations that in time may be seen as a new bio-complex: in terms of IPv6, a meshing between human functioning with the environment. As of yet, the issue of consciousness and spirit is still unresolved in this area. Yet it is everpresent, in my understanding.
Thanks - Kingsley
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