Keeping in the same vein as my last couple posts about accelerating technology, here’s a clip from an excellent movie called ‘waking life’, where accelerating change is talked about not only as a technological phenomenon, but an all-pervasive one.

It took billions of years for life to turn from single-celled to multi-celled organisms, some millions of years for mammals to evolve, some hundreds of thousands of years for humans, 10 000 years for agriculture (the end of nomadic hunter-gatherers and the establishment of cities), a few hundred years for science to get started, a hundred years for the industrial revolution, four or five decades for the computer revolution.

The next revolutions will be biotechnology (us messing with out own genetics, cloning, etc), and nanotechnology, which has so many incredible possible applications that I can’t even pick a couple to list.

And these revolutions will take maybe a decade or two. They are happening now.

In the video he talks about ‘neo-humans’. This is what I was talking about in my last post when I said we’d merge with machines, become information in the cloud, choosing our bodies at will using swarms of nano-bots. That’s not what HE says, but he definitely talks about man merging with machine, and something else that I love:

SELF-DIRECTED EVOLUTION. Evolution traditionally happens through natural selection. Survival of the fittest. Once we have the ability to control and transcend our biology, we can evolve in whatever ways we want. PERSONALLY, not together as a species, but as we, as individuals see fit. Self-directed evolution. That’s a term I’m definitely gonna yank and use as much as possible.

I want this all to happen. I think it’s exciting. I know lots of people don’t want it to happen. They think it’s scary. But if we want it or not is irrelevant regarding whether it will actually happen. It may, it may not, but people, lot’s of very very smart people are working on it. Right now. And they’re constantly getting closer. It’s in the news every fucking day if you’re up on the right blogs and websites. http://www.kurzweilai.net/ is a good one to start.

If it does happen, we’re all going to have to find a way to deal with it. Or you could kill yourself, I guess, but I don’t recommend anyone kill themselves. I actually value ALL human life, not just my friends and family and people who are from my country or my church. I don’t value the ‘life’ of a non-thinking embryo over the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers we waste fighting wars, you fucking religious whackjobs (Ok, sorry, cheap shot, I say this all in fun and only in love, feel free to call me whatever kind of whackjob you want… just look at the crazy neo-technocratic bullshit I post on here) (oh and for a big long speal about my views on abortion, which go a little further than just ‘pro-choice’, click here).

So anyway, if we’re creating a universal compu-biological consciousness, it’s pretty safe to say that God doesn’t exist. Yet. But we’re on our way to inventing one.