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For over two million years, our technological history only begins about 10,000 years before our era, with the founding of Göbekli Tepe.
From there, every half-century, then every decade, then every year, will mark an exponential acceleration of technological progress.
We are truly only at the dawn of an evolution made up of unpredictable ruptures, but one that is worth trying to anticipate by developing scenarios informed by history, the teachings of past and present civilisations, the latest technologies, and prospective imagination.
Forewords
𝚆𝚎 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚊𝚠𝚗 𝚘𝚏 𝚊𝚗 𝚎𝚟𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚖𝚊𝚍𝚎 𝚞𝚙 𝚘𝚏 𝚞𝚗𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚛𝚞𝚙𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎𝚜, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚒𝚜 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚑 𝚝𝚛𝚢𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚘 𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚒𝚙𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝚋𝚢 𝚍𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚕𝚘𝚙𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚜𝚌𝚎𝚗𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚘𝚜 𝚒𝚗𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚖𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢 𝚑𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚝𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚌𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚝𝚎𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚎𝚜, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗.
It seems that the world is headed for disaster. Rising oceans, disappearing species, financial collapse, resource depletion, overpopulation and hunger wars - the future is portrayed to us as an apocalypse. Very humanly, the future always seems uncertain and full of countless threats. Change creates uncertainty, and the future is invariably depicted as dystopian: technology will enslave humanity, destroy jobs, and isolate individuals from each other.
But for us, change is not a threat. Remaining faithful to Novalis' vision, we believe that the Golden Age is not in the past but ahead of us. Guided by Hölderlin's maxim, "where danger grows, so does what saves," we see technology as a solution to the problems it reveals or even catalyzes.
Each era believes it is at the apex of an evolution that has fully tended toward it, as if progress were increasing and linear, as if each era were the culmination of a conscious effort guided by those that preceded it. We believe, on the contrary, that in the light of an Evolution that began over 3 billion years ago on this Earth, we are only in the prehistory of humanity.
Over two million years, our technological history only begins about 10,000 years before our era, with the founding of Göbekli Tepe. And despite notable inventions such as the Antikythera mechanism around the 2nd century BC, the discovery of magnetism, steam power, and the first automata around the same time, it would take more than 19 centuries before the first decisive breakthroughs in all fields that would make modern science. From there, every half-century, then every decade, then every year, will mark an exponential acceleration of technological progress. We are truly only at the dawn of an evolution made up of unpredictable ruptures, but one that is worth trying to anticipate by developing scenarios informed by history, the teachings of past and present civilizations, the latest technologies, and prospective imagination.
The following articles have the advantage over a book of being able to evolve over the course of debates that must animate the concepts and test them against the facts. Ideas are not set in stone, and foresight needs to constantly adjust, taking into account new data and new problems. They draw on the knowledge of expert contributors in their fields, capable of adopting a multidisciplinary perspective to cross-cut the issues and envisage the mutually influencing evolutions of all aspects of the high-tech civilization that continues to be built before our very eyes.
A fresh new start has been given us.
What does a Golden Age look like? It is tempting to claim that the answer can only be subjective. And yet, when contemplating the current state of human relationships, the struggle for resources and space, human rights abuses, the unequal distribution of wealth, the exploitation of humans by other humans, pollution and environmental destruction in the name of the totemic dollar, among other daily difficulties, sap vital energy and erode the best intentions.
An improvement in our representative systems, our collective scale of values (what is the sovereign good, and must it necessarily be quantified in money?), cleaner and more sustainable energy sources, a fair distribution of wealth that allows the emergence of new talents finally liberated from the demands of daily survival, the fight against overconsumption through strictly tailored production to meet needs, and the recognition of nature as a full-fledged actor are all avenues for the evolution of our being-in-the-world.
All change must be gradual. There is always a time lag between the speed of technical advances, institutional transformations, and the assimilation of these novelties into mentalities. For this reason, prospective exercise must take into account these necessary stages. This is an additional challenge, but also a methodological guide to stage these different steps over time and over long periods. Of course, there is not a single possible evolutionary line, and various scenarios can be developed in parallel.
Innovation is about doing things differently and in unpredictable forms. The same invention can adopt very different variations from one era to another, improving exponentially. This is what makes this game of anticipation a constantly surprising intellectual adventure.
There are multiple ways to measure the evolution of terrestrial civilization.
First and foremost is the technological aspect, as it is the easiest to objectify: energy production methods, industrial yields, communication speeds, and computing power are among the most tangible factors of technical progress. In particular, the Kardashev scale cleverly focuses on energy production, which is the nurturing source of all industrial civilization. Although used extensively by science fiction enthusiasts and futurists, it does not lose its visionary power. It can serve as a guide over long periods of time, since a type V civilization would draw its energy from the entire universe. We still have some time left before we have to subsume Kardashev into a scale that counts parallel universes and their anti-universes.
Closer to our timescales, we need to be able to measure in each case the qualitative transformations that allow us to detect the transition from one civilizational era to another. In the past, energy was one factor among others, alongside food sources (biological energy): mastery of fire, then steam, and finally electricity, evolved in parallel with the transformation of our food sources, from hunting and gathering to agriculture and livestock, awaiting synthetic food and perhaps one day means of energizing the body without calorie ingestion beyond the growth period (perhaps through complete autophagic recycling of the body, coupled with rejuvenation techniques and stem cell manipulation).
At a time when we are finally concerned about the limited abundance of natural resources, another major step, if achieved, could constitute a historic turning point. If we could not only recycle all industrial and natural waste, but also, in a more distant future, directly manipulate matter to produce any chemical element from another, we would enter the 4th and 5th Industrial Revolutions.
Concurrently, synthetic biology and its promise to bypass the slow pace of Natural Evolution already allow us to envisage a clear change of perspective, with a convergence between industry, biology, and computing. Many industrial and biological substances - fuels, insulin - are already synthesized in this way. Furthermore, bacterial genetic code is being put to use to form the logic circuits of tomorrow, perhaps resulting in the first biological processors operating on binary bases. In addition to the future benefits, this is primarily a radical way of shedding new light on Descartes' "animal-machine," but with an understanding of the complexity of versatile, self-repairing, sensitive, evolutionary, and self-determined machines that living beings are.
In parallel with this dive into the biological infinitesimal, a similar decisive step will be taken in the manipulation of matter at the atomic level. Quantum computing and nanomaterials are two precursors of this revolution, but many fields will be transformed by the increasingly fine understanding of interactions between particles and their possible uses: medicine, energy, communications, information technology, and biotechnology will increasingly converge as their operating principles are described by a unified language of interactions and information transmission between subatomic particles.
But technology changes faster than the ideas that structure societies and upon which they have founded their institutions. Change cannot be measured by technical developments alone, because beliefs, values, and worldviews also have an impact on the course of history. Whether they encourage research in one direction or slow it down in another, they often have little impact on the actual march of technology but decisively influence the way in which it is received, used, ignored, or neutralized in a given time and place. From the multitude of opinions, traditions, beliefs, values, carried by all human societies, there emerges a form of will of an era, made of ambitions and fears, rejections and hopes, which retrospectively allow it to be characterized. Although it is impossible to put the psychology of a society into an equation, it must nevertheless be considered a major factor that directs the pace of the evolution of civilizations.
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Published : 2024-1-18
Reading time : 15 mn
