In the last essay in this series we discussed the emergence of enormous populations of sentient beings in the near future, in numbers so large that as one person is to the current human race, the totality of our current population is to these new beings…and then some. Roughly speaking you and I are one ten-billionth of humanity, and yet ten billion is far less than one ten-billionth of the kind of numerical surge in this scenario. Of course, life and culture are more than just about masses, yet on the average enormous congregations of beings create technology, political power, and historical influence according to their resources. We are facing a very concrete reason here to consider a post-human epic.
And that is just about taking up space, but at risk of sounding like a broken record, let’s take another look at time. If a population is living at Fast6, they have a million years for every year of Fast0. I need to give that some reality – imagine our technologically accelerated culture and everything it could accomplish, if it does not destroy itself, in the next million years – now imagine that happening every year inside these new cultures. Even without large numbers this would be stunning, but considered together the effects of dense sentience and accelerated time and we approach a much firmer foundation for the contention that conventional futurisms are swallowed by a tsunami.
No matter how technically challenging the creation of these new utanes of complexity, the citizens who will live in them have the numbers and the ‘time’ to achieve the limit case. No invention, no artistic problem, no cultural development that is fundamentally possible can be prevented from emerging somewhere…and possibly a billion somewheres. Within that, what agreements or covenants can even cohere enough for any sort of general assurance of mutual survival? There is still a shared infrastructure of physics and ecology at the Down0 foundational level – and that must be preserved enough to ‘host’ every other level!
Furthermore, now that a utane can hold its billion-billion-billions of selves in a space within ‘weapon’s range’ of a simple attack, even personal-scaled violence is completely disastrous. Under these conditions the expanded freedom of new worlds is balanced by an enormous increase in responsibility and most probably a necessity for monitoring and Platform intervention in the finest granularities of action and interaction. Given the plasticity of the Klowd in manifesting any physical design requested, a constant need to interpret intent becomes the primary task of ubiquitous computation. Do our current notions of privacy and freedom have much relevance here?
No, (in answer to that last rhetorical thingy)so it seems you have carte blanche to go as far and as deep and as wide as you want. Have to admit that I am ready for your interpretation of intent to begin showing up in my real time.
ReplyDelete