The Future of the Human Race

Don't worry I'm not going all Nostradamus on you. Recently I watched the film Transcendence, which has Johnny Depp playing a scientist who effectively gets uploaded to the internet and becomes the first truly artificial intelligence. It wasn't really that good. However, the story and main plot points I found very interesting and incidentally I have recently been considering the very ideas the film touches upon and so I thought I better write them down. You know for posterity or something. Please do read on.

The main point of the story emerges from the question of what exactly makes us human. Biologically our minds are just a series of complicated neural interactions. Our brain is an electrochemical soup and nothing more. What the film asks is, if you entirely copy the structure, interactions and connections of someone's brain, is that copy the same as the original person? Is something intangible, something more than just a chemical reaction, lost in between? Does the copy lack an all-important soul? To see my personal take on the arguments of the existence or not of the soul, you need only scroll down and find the post I have already written about it. I'm not sure exactly where I left it but it's somewhere down there. If you can't find it there, check behind the sofa. (If you can't be bothered to find it, basically, I think the whole idea of "souls" is tosh and yes we very much are just electrochemical soup.)

In the film, when Depp uploads his mind, he becomes incredibly powerful. He has the internet at his complete command, he can manipulate the stock market, he can literally do anything because everything is on the internet. Because the character is a scientist, he wants to expand his research and become as powerful and knowledgeable as possible. With his incredibly advanced intelligence and capabilities, he creates new technologies, develops nanobots that can cure any and every ailment, he can create things from effectively nothing. He becomes like a God (and the film doesn't hesitate to bash you around the head with the similarities between these advanced technologies and the divine).

The one advancement he makes (which got surprisingly little coverage in the film) is that the nanobots that he creates, which can literally cure the blind and heal the lame (*cough cough Jesus cough cough*) also connect the people they heal via wi-fi. This allows them to work both as individuals and as a collective unit all working towards the same goal. This idea of humanity being connected together, their brains literally on the internet, could I believe quite possibly humanity's salvation if it is ever developed and implemented.

The internet has connected people like nothing else in the history of the human race and is the greatest invention quite possibly in all of history. Well, fire and the wheel were big deals as well but the internet is right up there. I can, right now, at this very minute, contact someone thousands of miles away from me in real time. For the vast majority of human history this was an absolute impossibility and your best bet if you wanted to contact someone (in the next village let alone thousands of miles away) was a horse and a bit of paper. If you had paper. Or a horse. The internet has connected us as a species and yet...

Nigeria extremists abduct 91 people.
Gunmen fire on Pakistani flight.
Police seek man over Essex murder.
Ukraine army helicopter shot down.
Belfast killing spree revealed.
Libya in shock after activist's murder.

A handful of headlines from some news websites. How can this be? I can find out information instantaneously about things I don't understand, people I have never met. How can there still be so much violence in the world when knowledge and understanding are so readily available? Well the main reasons, I think, are that man may have this knowledge but whether we choose to access it and process it is entirely down to choice and it's still so much easier to hate, fear and destroy others than it is to empathize with them. But perhaps there is a way to bridge these problems.

Imagine a world where everyone's minds are connected to each other over the internet. You would be able to feel everything everyone else feels, hear the thoughts of everyone else and understand their feelings, motivations, desires, wants and needs. You would work as one piece in a collective whole. It would be absolute empathy. You would literally be stepping into every single living human beings shoes. How could you war with your neighbour if you understand all of their gripes, problems and also their hopes and fears. They would be your gripes, problems, hopes and fears just as much as they are theirs.

I personally believe that if this technology was developed (if it is possible) and implemented, including every human mind on the planet, war would be extinguished overnight forever. The human race would be of one mind. Think of all of human progress from fire to the internet. We have come this far whilst fractured and divided, our shared history marred by violence and hatred. Just imagine what could be achieved with every single person working towards the common goal of the preservation and continuation of the human race. Scientific advancements are accelerating at an unbelievable pace right now, united, humanity would develop technologies that would make the most advanced computers of 2014 look no better than an abacus.

7 billion minds all contributing to one great hive mind.

This idea I have actually kind of stolen...

Joe Halderman's book Forever Peace (sequel to the absolutely fantastic and biting satire of the Vietnam War, The Forever War) essentially has this idea as the major plot point. In the future, wars are fought by robot suits that are controlled hundreds of miles away from the battlefields (Remote controlled death machines? That's just crazy...) by soldiers that are all have their minds connected together. The soldiers experience everything their comrades experience, they share their memories and effectively work as a 7 brained organism (I don't know if Pacific Rim stole this idea but if you have seen that film it works in the same way as "drifting". If you haven't seen it, WATCH IT). It is revealed later in the book that there is actually a design flaw with this hooking up. If the soldiers stay connected for too long, they become super empathetic. They know what it is to be another person and so they become entirely unable to harm another living being. It's impossible for them. Now, soldiers that can't hurt people aren't very useful, so of course the military hush it up but anyway if you want to know what happens read the book.

The point is, I think that this could be a realistic outcome of the connecting together of people's brains. So, do I think that this could be a possibility for humanity's future? Yes. Why? Because it has to be.

Homo sapiens, as a species, could have quite easily come to an end during the Cold War. One cross word and the whole world could have turned into a ball of irradiated dust. As Electric Six sang in their song Dirty Looks, "Every nuclear war begins with two, Dirty looks". We are currently facing climate change which may well prove our undoing but if every mind was connected together...

No war.
7 billion minds working towards a common goal.
Infighting and partisanship a thing of the past.

I can't help but feel that we won't last long without this. Currently, we've been lucky, almost unbelievably so considering the near misses our species has had, but our luck may not last forever. If we are to survive into the future, the pooling of resources and ideas is essential but may never be achieved if we continue to be divided by borders, our differences, our cultures, our religions even the few centimeters of skin, bone and blood that separate our brains.

So when do I think this will happen? I have no idea. Possibly thousands of years. Quite possibly tens of thousands. Technology is moving, as I previously mentioned, at a simply phenomenal rate so perhaps it's closer than tens of thousands but it's still way, way off. I do hope I'm wrong and this technology is just around the corner but I somehow doubt it is. I also hope humans last long enough for this technology to become a reality. If they do, I can't even begin to imagine the wonders that this technology will give rise to. Our present would seem to our future descendants to be as barbarous, violent and backwards as parts of our not-so-distant past seem to us.

So if I don't think this will happen until years after my body has been reduced to dust and scattered across the Earth, what's the point in talking about it now? Well if you don't understand why I'm asking a philosophical question that currently has no impact on the world, you don't understand philosophy and you need to read my very first post on this page (Yeah that's right this whole post is actually just a big advert for all my previous posts. It's my blog and I do what I like with it!) but also you're wrong, asking this question can affect the here and now. Stopping to consider the potential, wide ranging effects of "super empathy" should (I hope) inspire you to try your best at every opportunity to empathize with your fellow human beings. We can't see into other people's minds but we can use our reasoning, intelligence, imagination and our imperfect existing empathy to try to understand. It's easy to categorize people as good and bad (For my analysis of why doing this is bad see... ah screw it you probably already read it anyway...) but no-one ever does something randomly. We all have our influences and reasons for our actions and the sooner we recognize that, the closer we get to a peaceful world where we work together to defeat our problems, problems that are universal. Next time you disagree with someone put yourself in their shoes. It's stuff we were told in school but it's something a lot of people forget. I know I forget it at times.

Christ, I sound like a right hippy don't I...