I’ve been thinking a lot lately about super-humans. Perhaps as a natural reaction to all the Christian-based news and events going on today my naturalistic and technological oriented brain started focusing on futurism. At any rate, I’ve been having a lot of complex discussions with people about super-humans and what I consider to be a super-human.
I believe a super-human is one that knows everything. Knowledge is the basis for almost every aspect of power in today’s society. Of course, in the future the technological singularity will, in my opinion, give birth to a genuinely smarter-than-human “awake” machine. In order to facilitate computational demands, I believe we will more recently see the progression of human brain/machine development.
Along those lines, my point is as follows. We already have super-humans. Not only do they live among us, they are you and me.
What we have is a global network of information that can be accessed from anywhere. PDAs, wireless networks, cellular networks, etc. Everything basically connects to what I call “the network;” The global infrastructure that surrounds us and contributes to our lives. You and I are more in tune with the network because we live it and breathe it (I assume so because you’re reading this blog entry, you probably read MetaFilter and browse Wikipedia) but in the future perhaps one will be connected, truly connected. At this point we have a connection to the network through our keyboards and monitors. The response time is extremely slow in comparison to a direct connection but in regards to the information capacity, we are still super-human.
Is there a human alive that can answer every Jeopardy question 100% of the time starting with Show 1 from Season 1 to present? What about get a 100% score on any history exam given from any university on the planet, 100% of the time? If they are connected to the network, the answer is yes, there is.
That my friends, is super-human.
3 Responses to “We Are Super-Humans”rss
Rich, on April 18th, 2005, said:
Kinda along these lines are two books by a very interesting guy, Ray Kurzweil. First is "The Age of Spiritual Machines" That’s a few years old but a fascinating read. Also, there’s his latest book which I own but have yet to read, "The Singularity is Near"
Patrick Dugan, on November 12th, 2005, said:
I think you exaggerate when you say “knows everything”. Sure, global networks might give us potential access to a very wide breadth of information, but in order to harness it one needs meta-knowledge about what to look for an how. I think a better term is weakly transhuman, emphasis on “weakly.” When we interact with technology such as the net our memes are changed, perhaps improved, and we get closer to the singular ideal, but not even the most information adept genuis amoung us is anywhere close to “superhuman”.
Daniel Hazelton Waters, on November 13th, 2005, said:
It’s not so much knowledge thats the key issue.
We are on the verge of a hyper exponential compounding explosion of technological increase. 2007 Quantum Computing becomes scalable, Cern creates black holes, New telescopes peer deep into Existence. 2009 Nanotech becomes more viable first quantum operating system is online… 2011 Contact…
3.14159…
Commenting
You can use these tags:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>Your nasty comment spam will be blocked by Akismet.