Some minor issues

Last Wednesday I was attending an evening session organized by Vepec. Special guest: Cees Hamelink. When I saw his name popping up I was intrigued: as a student Communication Science I had the pleasure to follow his class. He really impressed me back at the days, so I wanted to see more.

That evening Professor Hamelink was like the Dutch version of Ray Kurzweil. His central these: the internet is going to explode. Why? Because for 1 thing we are surrounded by incompetence (this part I could follow). It’s frustrating, but in the end it’s only showing us the limits and stupidity of our human brains. Normal people are (or will be shortly) incapable to understand technology. This combined with a load of spam, viruses, hackers .. will result in an exploding internet. People won’t use it anymore.
Unless .. (and here comes the Kurzweil part) us people are willing to “improve” ourselves. Improving by using technology to boost our brains.
In Professor Hamelink’s story there is no other option: or the internet will get killed because us human being will become too stupid to use it, or we upgrade ourselves. But in the end this will result in technology taking over. “The future doesn’t need us“, Bill Joy in Wired Magazine, 2000.

I am very short about that evening. It was a pretty long, well thought monologue. Pretty good. Afterwards there was a debate with Frederic De Vries from These Days (the interactive agency I work for) and Christophe Vergult from Insites (a research firm). Again pretty inspiring.
But I’m rushing this trough because I have some thoughts myself I wanted to share. If you’re interested in the subject I recommend you to read Kurzweil’s “The age of spiritual machines“. I read this book in the year 2000 I think, and it was all coming back.

So my thoughts. It’s getting metaphysical I’m afraid, sorry.

The future doesn’t need us .. but does the present need us? How do you define the future? Is time an entity that at this point does need human beings and in the future won’t? I doubt it. The future, the present, the past .. it’s all about .. me. Not about Steven, I mean it’s about us .. but from a personal first person standpoint. After all thing only get sense because we exist. If we die, we don’t care anymore. If we were never born, we never did. We feel good because we have inter-human relations, we work hard because it makes us feel a certain way, .. but in the end society is a collection of individuals. I’m making this point from a metaphysical view, not a cultural.
I think understanding this is quite crucial (although it seems obvious). The future we define will only exists/mean something because we experience it. Let’s say technology takes over, kills all people, and keeps evolving (AI wise). It wouldn’t mean a thing, because there is no one subconscious to witness it.

If a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, then does it make a sound?

So in the end, even if we have upgraded brains, as long as we experience things, it would mean a thing. Descartes already knew this: “I think, therefore I am”. Perhaps it’s better “I experience, therefore I am”. Descartes experienced thinking.

But it’s a scary thought. It’s hard to give up control. Our improved brains will keep evolving, it’s by improving our brains, technology will be able to take itself to the next level. It’s technology improving technology. It’s out of our hands. And indeed, there is no way back. My thought: eventually we will loose control.

There is one last problem. If meaning is created by consciousness, we need to know what consciousness is. We’re all conscious, no problem there. But what if some machine in a few decades says it’s conscious. What if it really “thinks” it’s conscious? It might be programmed to say so, but after all it’s in there. How do we deal with that, artificial consciousness? That’s a though one. How does consciousness originate? Is it the configuration of our brain (this can be reproduced) or perhaps it’s the material (but maybe computers will be organic one day)? We can’t know, and perhaps we never will. How will we know the self proclaimed consciousness is real or not? How do we after all know the consciousness of our fellow humans is real or not (remember the solipsism). We will assume.
I’m sure a lot of people call a lifeline by pointing to “the mind” or using some God as a trump card. People usually tend to do if they can’t solve the puzzle by thinking ..

I warned you it was going to be metaphysical