RE: What is the next age? (i.e., industrial age)
January 31, 2019 at 11:51 am
(This post was last modified: January 31, 2019 at 12:02 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(January 30, 2019 at 5:03 pm)Thoreauvian Wrote: I vote for "the age of renewable energies." We're running out of affordable fossil fuels this century. We need to switch because of climate change. So our technologies are going to change rapidly in the next several decades: power generation, transportation, appliances, food production, etc.
Genetics and robotics are just distracting toys in comparison.
Renewable energy will hardly change human society on any scale similar to the original agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution. It will be a relatively marginal change to how humans fulfill their basic long standing needs.
Genetics and robotics on the other hand will change humans themselves into something else all together with drastically different fundamental needs, not just how humans as largely the same as we have been for a few hundred thousand years a might change on the margins how we fulfill our long standing needs.
In a few hundred years, genetics and symbiotic robotics could easily change humans to th point that human society contain nothing that we would remotely consider calling humans today.
I think if we were last several thousand more years, majority of “human” society at the end of that period will no longer have any flesh and blood component, but consist of highly interconnected mentalities operating on and experiencing through future equivalent of a civilization spanning internet.
