I believe that we are living in the most pivotal century of human history yet. I believe that at the end of the century, what being a human is like will have undergone a more radical change than any other revolution in our history (yes, even the agricultural one). That is, if we even survive this century, which is an if of reasonable size.
It's estimated that psychologically modern humans came into existence about 50k years ago. At that point, you could probably kidnap a baby from that time and have them integrate pretty well into our modern society. Hell, even before that point you could probably have someone raised under the same circumstances adapt relatively well. Which is kind of weird to think about. People back then more or less tolerated all kinds of things that would horrify almost anyone today, such as slavery, marital rape, rape in general, brutal executions, human sacrifice, etc. Not to say that those things don't happen today; it's more like they've been swept under the rug. But ask virtually anyone today about their opinion about those subjects, and chances are they'd react with emphatic opposition. And yet, some eerie similarities shine through as well, sometimes amusing, sometimes touching. People told crude jokes, wrote even cruder graffiti, sent heartfelt letters to their loved ones, complained about a local business scamming them. This mix of the mundanely familiar and the shocking can be strange, kind of funny even. The more we change, the more we stay the same.
But that's not the point of this post. No, the point is that that might all be going away in our lifetimes.
The strongest common thread between us and our ancestors is arguably our more or less shared genetics and neural/general anatomy and physiology. Anyone alive today has more or less the same brain and the same body as a roman from 2000 years ago, or even a hunter-gatherer from our most ancient parts of our history as homo sapiens. Thanks to the emerging technologies of genetic modification, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence, all that is likely to change. Any attempt to block genetic and/or cybernetic modification of humans on ethical or some other grounds is likely to fail miserably, as any entity that tries to do so has a massive advantage to gain. Super soldiers that easily get stronger than any natural human that only needs to be fed some kind of cheap nutrient paste. People that have a high resistance to the damaging effects of drugs and other chemicals. Hyper-fertile people who can just pump out babies nonstop. This could perhaps even reach the extreme of the Tleilaxu women from Dune, which are females who have been genetically modified to the point where they're basically just massive wombs, with any other human part of them having been stripped away.
These would be bizarre enough. But I haven't even touched on the ways that our brain could be fucked with. Even something as "simple" as increasing the speed at which signals are sent in our brains would have massive repercussions on one's psyche. They'd probably experience everything happening far more slowly than we were ever meant to experience, which could be a pretty horrific form of torture on its own. You might not exactly get to recreate the experience of the Jaunt, but you could get pretty damn close. Of course, you could theoretically account for this by, say, making them ultra-patient. Make it so that they could handle a subjective eternity of being locked in a dark box. While we're at it, we could make people be able to handle a lot of other things most find unpleasant or even unbearable. People who would unquestioningly work in dangerous conditions without pay, possibly even being incapable of considering escape or striking or whatever. Hell, you could probably get them to enjoy it, as well.
Yes, this already sort of exists in the form of brainwashing. But it isn't easy. You really have to break someone, convince them that they have no chance of ever experiencing even a shred of dignity outside of your occasional acts of mercy. And even then, it isn't always reliable. Slave revolts have happened. People underestimate the craftiness of the desperate. Glimpses of an outside appear, no matter how hard any given elite tries to suppress them. With the right understanding of how to modify the human brain, you could theoretically have the perfect drone right out of the box, or gestation chamber, or clone vat. Again, unimaginable advantages for anyone willing to seize them.
And AI is a whole other thing. An AI is likely to be far more alien to us in behavior than an actual alien would be. An alien would probably have arisen in similar basic conditions to us. They would need to eat, reproduce, and all the other things that get your genes passed along in the darwinian game. An AI, on the other hand, would be bound to no such restrictions. It would likely not have any of the hallmarks of a psychology that developed in an evolutionary environment, because obviously, it had not evolved. It has no need for food, no desire for sex or companionship, unless we had programmed those things into it. That's another thing. A lot of modern programs that we call AIs are a bit of a black box. A lot of them were made via neural nets, where they learn how to perform a function based on the given inputs. It would be difficult to know how it knows what to do, even if you could look at its internal code. I suppose, in a way, that means that it did evolve, just not under any "environment" that we were in. Who knows what sorts of things a true AI might do utilizing a system of logic that we do not understand? Would we be in for the singularity? Would we be somehow integrated into the system, or exist like a kind of pest, hiding in the cracks that some vastly higher intelligence of our own making overlooks or does not care to check? Or would we be allowed to exist at all?
Even besides those factors, we're in for a doozy of a century. Surveillance getting more common and more sophisticated. Wealth inequality is reaching levels we haven't seen in a long time. People are getting fed up with the current system and are becoming increasingly open to alternatives. Discussion of the possibility of civil war in the US has become mainstream. Old religious systems have lost much of their grip on the world, and nobody's sure what exactly will replace them. And above all those issues is climate change. At this point, it's going to happen. Mitigation is the name of the game now. And even then, a lot of the response to it has been far more tepid than it needs to be. There will be mass migrations of people seeking better conditions to live and farm. You thought the Syrian refugee crisis was bad? Much worse is coming. As the icecaps melt, it will release gases trapped in the ice such as methane, which will speed up the process greatly. Not to mention that without a fuckton of ice to reflect sunlight back into space, the earth will absorb even more heat. And with the melting ice will come preserved bacteria and viruses, the likes of which we had not been exposed to for thousands of years. Worst case scenario, our entire species could get ravaged like the indigenous populations of the americas were ravaged by smallpox. By several different diseases. At the same time.
Oh, and I'd like to mention that we still have a few nukes kicking around. Just saying.
There's also the possibility of some mass spiritual awakening of some kind, but I honestly don't know enough about the esoteric and the spiritual world to make any definitive predictions there. Still, no matter which way you slice it, we're living in interesting times, and we're on the brink of living in even more interesting times.
In spite of what I just said, I'm glad to be alive. I'm glad to be alive right now. It's bittersweet, to be honest. I came into being and into maturity at the same time that the only form of intelligent life we know of for sure developed the internet, a repository of most of the knowledge of our species, and may live to see it all taken away. I'm glad to have even had the opportunity to see all the things that I have, even the darker, even despicable sides of humanity. I'm glad to have seen seen weird and wonderful things, to have met people I otherwise would have never known, to have learned things I likely would not have come across otherwise. Have a nice life, y'all.
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