2016

The last few years, or maybe the decade I was focussing on technology and people spending no attention on where the world is heading to.

This autumn I came back to see what's next. And here is the summary in the spirit of Stanislaw Lem: not predicting the future but sensing the visible horizon.

New reality

Capital just went wild: it is experimenting on us, and we pay the bill.

Technology — through Artificial Intelligence and Big Data — became the only holder of the truth. No one outside Technology knows ever more what's true, what's real.

People became like plants and animals. We are no more special, we are just another item of the biosphere.

The man

It still likes best to delve into rest; to live inside its own bubble where there is certainty; where things look familiar, where everything looks like and behaves like expected.

Outside of the bubble it is interested only in miracles. Since we live the age of asymmetry there are plenty of miracles every day. If there is a small bread for everyday that's good enough; the rest of its life is filled by the unseen-before-magic of this new circus.

East / West

East is aggression West is utopia. East is the cruel reality West is the peaceful dream.

East is growing in size West is not. If we think in the old, power and force based formula, West is on decline.

However we entered the information age where power, mass, speed, energy — the classic, physical world and its rules — are no longer relevant.

What only matters are the law of information: the probability of events. Who will know what will happen, who can leverage what will happen — will win.

If West will keep its huge advantage in Artificial Intelligence / Big Data, and, it will use in the benefit of people instead of exploiting people, then it will win. If not, West is going to fall.

Art + Science

Up until know we had some equilibrium: Progress (art and science) was immediately beneficial for People, then gradually taken over by Power.

Now Art is left behind; the last genius — Basquiat — died before the new millennium. Since then nothing. It takes too much time for man to realize what to do, how to disrupt. And when a new revolution is finally on — the elite immediately takes over.

The energy of the mass can no longer be put in motion by art, only by power and politics.

Science lives a breakthrough these days; up until now they were experimenting on atoms, mice and chimps, now they do on us.

Since we are the subject of experiments the benefits cannot go back to us, they go up to a higher level, whatever that level might be.

In Ten Years

Ten years ago I wrote:

We are programmable biocomputers shaped by Culture. A culture controlled by state and capital, soon by Technology.
This era could be about a new metasystem transition. For such a shift we need, first of all, new senses.
A new perception about ourselves built bottom up, by a new generation, on new values.

Since then we've lost our humanity and we've lost the sense of reality.

Everything which helped us to progress either got weakened — art — or got transformed — science.

2016

Article meta

People

Donald Knuth

John Horton Conway

Stanislaw Lem

Bertrand Russell

John C Lilly

Gerd Gerken

Valentin F Turchin

Paul Virilio

Craig J Venter

Adam Curtis

Bela Hamvas

Steve Yegge

Arthur Rimbaud

Hasan Elahi

John Dos Passos

Dostoevsky

Albert Laszlo Barabasi

Julian Assange

Stephen Hawking

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Nikita Mikhalkov

Dimitri Verhults

Alexander Brody

Samuel Butler

Aleksandr Kuprin

Jorge Luis Borges

Charles Bukowski