The Present Through the Lens of the Future – Part 7 – Digital Life
Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question. But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective). So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?
The contenders:
- Climate Change
- Finite Resources
- A World Without Growth
- Evolving Our Values
- Expanding ‘I’
- Coping with Acceleration
- Digital Life
- Polarization vs. Homogeneity
Digital Life
Speaking of exponentials and the acceleration of change… we find ourselves amidst the great digitization of life. Information is king, the rate and frequency of communication is accelerating. As we merge with our technology, we increasingly live our lives digitally, virtually. In this trend is there perhaps an element of detachment from our physical constraints?
The digitization of our lives has (and will have increasingly) changed the way that we relate to each other and to the physical world. The conflicting trends of evermore agency to determine the slice of humanity with whom one interacts in what capacity (without consideration of the boundaries of geography or language) and the increasing influence over our perceived agency by the systems that collect information and manage our digital lives affects our culture, our values, and even our vocabulary.
If we go so far as to imagine merging with our technology yet further, the question of when we will have determined ourselves to have evolved into a post-human raises its head. How will we manage these rapid transitions? How should we incorporate technology into our lives? Do we change the way that we value future people? Does digitization enable new ways to organize society? A grand challenge indeed.
It could be argued that digitization reduces our dependence on the health of the planet. We will still need to eat and have access to water (until we fully digitize consciousness… I’ll leave those discussions for the futurists of Silicon Valley), but perhaps we could envision surviving climate disaster by increasingly dissociating our society and culture from the physical world. Whether this trend will serve to reduce the burden we place on the ecosystems in which we participate (and thus be part of the solution to climate change), or will serve as an adaptation to a reduction in ecosystem capacity (i.e. we wrecked the planet but now define our quality of life in the context of a digital existence), if sufficient time is granted our species without collapse (internally- or externally-mediated) our student of the future will likely be unable to empathize with our current (relatively) analog culture.