Freedom, Creativity & Technology
Freedom, Creativity & Technology
The fundamental human nature is the desire for freedom, and freedom leads to mobility and free will, to a certain extent. This explains why human beings ceaselessly invent technologies over the last several million years. They are so important that our history is categorised by them: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, ....and so on. It is actually a product of natural selection: with a changing environment, it is always of better survival advantage to be able to search freely far and apart for better foods and shelters, not to mention the most desirable mates. It is fitting to quote Georg Hegel: "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom". The first technology human beings invented was the language, a telecommunication technology, which heavily relies on the human brain's computing capability. Languages enable the propagation of ideas at the speed of sound over short distances, thus becoming the carrier of meme as advocated by Dawkins . Languages help us tell the tale of thinking: now we can think aloud!! As John Locke asserted, humen are set free by their languages. And memes not just get stored in brains internally, they can be saved externally, paving the way for their exponential growth. History has shown that technologies grow at exponential rates, thus resulting in exponential growth in knowledge, freedom and mobility. People in technologically advanced societies thus have easier access to existing technologies which enable more freedom of thinking and creativity, and leading to even faster technological development, and exponential growth in technologies. Technologies always result in the disintegration of hierarchy ( and chimpanzees have it too, as described by Jane Goodall in In the Shadow of Man ), physical/man-made boundaries (which mainly exist due to the lack of technologies, information and material wealth), making societies and corporations flatter and flatter in structure, and more person-to-person based. Examples of this include the emergence of the open source and open standards movements. The development of computing technologies accelerate this trend and set the human spirit free on a global scale. Massive amount of information can be retrieved from anywhere, at anytime and by anyone. This relieves the burden of the brain for more creative thinking. And every individual has the equal opportunity to access the same information. Therefore there will be no place for the middleman and hierarchy, but only the creator of knowledge, ideas, services and products and the consumer or the end receiver. Nowadays ideas or memes roam at the speed of light in a global computer/telecommunication network apart from the more traditional channels. Expensive "big iron" mainframes are replaced by parallel/cluster networked computers that are purchased of the shelf at little cost. Technologies develop at an exponential rate which far exceeds the wildest linear extrapolation or prediction normally made, no matter how wildly ambitiou it may initially seem. Globalization, space travel, space colonization and settlement become a reality. A youngster in the middle of nowhere ( Internet for poverty ) ) can write a piece of software which makes the business models of huge corporations obsolete immediately. Now the only way to go is bottom up, just like the way Nanotechnology is employed, and the same principle is also used by lliving things in their evolution : self-replication, self-growth, self-learning and reproduction, all based on the same bottom-up approach! The only difference between the propogation of genes and memes is in the speed and the length of life cycles, which explains why we are facing an information explosion Today. Memes now seems to tower over genes as a result. This is simply because new technologies and knowledge are developed at much faster speed and they can be used to alter or improve the genes of living things for better natural selection. It is possible that your genes will be less important as before. That is to say that the propogation of memes will take over the propogation of genes as the dominant force in the natural evolution of living organisms. In this sense, we are actually in control of our destiny, as Popper once said. The BIG BANG is the best and Greatest example for nanotechnology , but we will also be able to change the course of it after 15 bilion years of its grand begaining with the shear power of our mind. And the future? Maybe quantum internet and quantum computing will enable multi-dimensional instantaneous telecommunication over any imaginable distance due to the use of quantum entanglement.. This exponential growth will only slow down when all the atoms of the universe have nearly been used up by technologies for storing information/data. If you think that Norbert Wiener's prediction in the 50s is valid, then it may well be valid for a long time to come:
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. (by N. Wiener 1950)
From a broader perspective, knowledge creation and growth can thus be considered as the most fundemental process in natural evolution.. And cultural evolution, which includes the evolution of ideas on the based memes including the growth of knowledge and technologies, has surpassed biological evelution based on DNA in nature. For example, in biological evolution, the DNA molecules and genes mutate (prediction) as a result of errors, sexual recombination including gene shuffling and crossing-over, and finally the genes that are passed to the new generations are the ones selected by nature (refutation), i.e., a trial and error process, thus new knowledge is created and stored in the DNA molecules. The formation of celestial structures, galaxies and solar systems, also go through the same processes, and their existing structures bear the footprints of the learning processes and the knowledge created. The most important question is whether we can develop a theory to predict how knowledge or intellegence including free wills will change the course of natural evolution. Or simply can we (or some other intellegent beings) play god ?
The fundamental human nature is the desire for freedom, and freedom leads to mobility and free will, to a certain extent. This explains why human beings ceaselessly invent technologies over the last several million years. They are so important that our history is categorised by them: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, ....and so on. It is actually a product of natural selection: with a changing environment, it is always of better survival advantage to be able to search freely far and apart for better foods and shelters, not to mention the most desirable mates. It is fitting to quote Georg Hegel: "The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom". The first technology human beings invented was the language, a telecommunication technology, which heavily relies on the human brain's computing capability. Languages enable the propagation of ideas at the speed of sound over short distances, thus becoming the carrier of meme as advocated by Dawkins . Languages help us tell the tale of thinking: now we can think aloud!! As John Locke asserted, humen are set free by their languages. And memes not just get stored in brains internally, they can be saved externally, paving the way for their exponential growth. History has shown that technologies grow at exponential rates, thus resulting in exponential growth in knowledge, freedom and mobility. People in technologically advanced societies thus have easier access to existing technologies which enable more freedom of thinking and creativity, and leading to even faster technological development, and exponential growth in technologies. Technologies always result in the disintegration of hierarchy ( and chimpanzees have it too, as described by Jane Goodall in In the Shadow of Man ), physical/man-made boundaries (which mainly exist due to the lack of technologies, information and material wealth), making societies and corporations flatter and flatter in structure, and more person-to-person based. Examples of this include the emergence of the open source and open standards movements. The development of computing technologies accelerate this trend and set the human spirit free on a global scale. Massive amount of information can be retrieved from anywhere, at anytime and by anyone. This relieves the burden of the brain for more creative thinking. And every individual has the equal opportunity to access the same information. Therefore there will be no place for the middleman and hierarchy, but only the creator of knowledge, ideas, services and products and the consumer or the end receiver. Nowadays ideas or memes roam at the speed of light in a global computer/telecommunication network apart from the more traditional channels. Expensive "big iron" mainframes are replaced by parallel/cluster networked computers that are purchased of the shelf at little cost. Technologies develop at an exponential rate which far exceeds the wildest linear extrapolation or prediction normally made, no matter how wildly ambitiou it may initially seem. Globalization, space travel, space colonization and settlement become a reality. A youngster in the middle of nowhere ( Internet for poverty ) ) can write a piece of software which makes the business models of huge corporations obsolete immediately. Now the only way to go is bottom up, just like the way Nanotechnology is employed, and the same principle is also used by lliving things in their evolution : self-replication, self-growth, self-learning and reproduction, all based on the same bottom-up approach! The only difference between the propogation of genes and memes is in the speed and the length of life cycles, which explains why we are facing an information explosion Today. Memes now seems to tower over genes as a result. This is simply because new technologies and knowledge are developed at much faster speed and they can be used to alter or improve the genes of living things for better natural selection. It is possible that your genes will be less important as before. That is to say that the propogation of memes will take over the propogation of genes as the dominant force in the natural evolution of living organisms. In this sense, we are actually in control of our destiny, as Popper once said. The BIG BANG is the best and Greatest example for nanotechnology , but we will also be able to change the course of it after 15 bilion years of its grand begaining with the shear power of our mind. And the future? Maybe quantum internet and quantum computing will enable multi-dimensional instantaneous telecommunication over any imaginable distance due to the use of quantum entanglement.. This exponential growth will only slow down when all the atoms of the universe have nearly been used up by technologies for storing information/data. If you think that Norbert Wiener's prediction in the 50s is valid, then it may well be valid for a long time to come:
The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. (by N. Wiener 1950)
From a broader perspective, knowledge creation and growth can thus be considered as the most fundemental process in natural evolution.. And cultural evolution, which includes the evolution of ideas on the based memes including the growth of knowledge and technologies, has surpassed biological evelution based on DNA in nature. For example, in biological evolution, the DNA molecules and genes mutate (prediction) as a result of errors, sexual recombination including gene shuffling and crossing-over, and finally the genes that are passed to the new generations are the ones selected by nature (refutation), i.e., a trial and error process, thus new knowledge is created and stored in the DNA molecules. The formation of celestial structures, galaxies and solar systems, also go through the same processes, and their existing structures bear the footprints of the learning processes and the knowledge created. The most important question is whether we can develop a theory to predict how knowledge or intellegence including free wills will change the course of natural evolution. Or simply can we (or some other intellegent beings) play god ?
posted by insight | 7:37 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home