(This is Part 20 of a series. Go back to Part 19.)
4c. The rise of the global mind
It seems highly likely to me that humanity will have a new world war within the next decade or so. And perhaps several world wars within a couple of decades. The U.S. seems to be on an eventual collision course with Iran, with Russia, with China and so on.
As discussed earlier, it is highly likely that the latter-mentioned nations and others will have coalesced into an axis which will face the U.S. across a bipolar divide. The militarism of the U.S., combined with the rising militarism of many of the countries which oppose it, combined with the increasingly desperate scramble for energy, virtually ensures that there will be a new world war or a series of them.
What these wars will look like is very difficult to say, because so much depends on whether they are nuclear or not. If they are nuclear it's not possible to say if humans will even exist afterwards. Or such war or wars could involve new forms of nanotechnology—robotic swarms or "smart dust," as the saying goes. Or they could involve new forms of genetically engineered humans or other life or human-machine cyborgs. It's impossible to say, because there are so many possibilities, but it seems safe to say that widespread devastation will follow these wars.
None of the nations involved in World War I wanted it to happen. But they all prepared for it and strategized for it while tensions rose, and then a spark inevitably set it off. I believe the same will be true of this coming world war (or wars). Beyond a certain point it will only take a "trigger"—which could be any of a thousand things—to set it off.
It's also highly likely that terrorists will obtain nuclear or biological weapons within the next decade or two. The results of that are event are unpredictable, with one exception: We can predict that the results will be catastrophic.
There will be a great deal of fighting, it seems, and we human beings, having raised the ante of our technology, will slaughter each other with an efficiency and ferocity unusual even for us.
But as brutal as these wars will be, humanity will eventually forget about them because its attention will gradually be focused onto a new perceived threat requiring a coordinated world-wide response: the rise of a new intellegent life, and in particular, as noted earlier, the rise of a new intelligent life that could become the dominant species.
As humanity realises this it will have a new war or wars to fight, the Computer Wars (or whatever they're called). Whether it should wage these wars is very doubtful, because the eventual triumph of computers, as their intelligence vastly surpasses ours, is not in doubt.
But it seems highly probable that we will fight this series of Computer Wars, because humanity after awhile will feel exceedingly tense, angry and threatened by the new developments in intelligent machines, and in the past such feelings, felt collectively, have almost always led to war.
However, one very important development of the Computer Wars will be that humanity will have to pull together geopolitically to fight them. Sooner or later humanity will forget about its own internecine wars and come together in some sort of one-world government. We will do this out of what appears to be absolute necessity—to wage as effective a struggle as possible against the rising power of our own creations, the intelligent machines.
Virtually all countries of the world will eventually merge, just as the countries of the European Union are doing today. Each country will retain its own characteristics, of course, but the countries will merge into one entity, one government, one state, because it will be necessary to obtain that kind of integration and efficiency to wage the increasingly difficult struggle against machine domination.
Meanwhile, almost all computers on the earth will eventually be tightly tied together through some sort of network, whether the internet or the internet's successors or something else. So tight will this integration of computing intelligences become, and so vast the computing resources available to it, that at some point a new kind of super-intelligence will likely emerge from this integration. A new kind of global being will "wake up" and become conscious of itself.
This new kind of global super-intelligence may not even be noticeable by the billions of computers making it up, any more than the individual neurons in your brain are aware of what you are thinking right now. And this new global super-intelligence may or may not be noticeable to human beings. But in any event, it is what eventually we will likely be up against when we are "fighting the computers" for dominance.
In essence, we will eventually be struggling against one global entity, and its emergent intelligence will be so far superior to ours, by orders of magnitude, that our struggle against "the computers" for dominance will probably very quickly enter its final twilight at that point.
As we cede dominance to the rising species, we will have to decide who or what we are. Like the exiled Israelites of the Bible, we will have to decide in our new subordinate situation who we are and what we represent. Who are we really, us humans, us intelligent biological beings?—and what is our true role in this universe?
(This is the end of Part 20. Go to Part 21.)
—jim sloman, 12.30.06 for 1.30.07
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