This is the second part of my science fiction experiment in which I try to imagine the future by exploring the best ideas from 100 science fiction novels. *

4. The stronger the technology develops, the less noticeable it becomes

Almost all visions of the future that I met had one thing in common: they were dominated by visible technology. This is a kind of first bell telling us that the writer is wrong.

In almost every one of these stories, technology is something intrusive, tangible, monolithic, and fixated on itself. Cities are usually presented as whole seas from chrome-plated buildings where there is not a single tree. In apartments, bulky utensils support the walls, trimmed with plastic, just like in the space capsule of the sixties. Our bodies are crammed with crude mechanisms, meaning that transhumanism will externally bring a person closer to the machine, and not vice versa.

But for me personally it’s absolutely obvious that the technologies will develop completely differently. These predictions are suitable for a civilization that has just opened gadgets, which is mired in neomania, an obsession with everything new, to which the future is presented as a world where everything will be GREAT and where everything will be GREAT. Like a child who thinks that adults are people of great stature, able to buy more expensive toys (although I know some individuals who really think so).

Most likely, the technology of the future will eventually turn into something like a Force from Star Wars. Think it over. She has the best interface possible: it doesn’t exist at all. There is no delay between thought and action, there is no barrier between subject and object. The Jedi Knight never worries about whether he has upgraded to the new version, whether he needs to charge the battery or remember the password for Wi-Fi.

Power is present everywhere and nowhere; it can be used for evil, however, it is fully revealed only on the bright side; in essence it is spiritual power, but it has direct practical application. The day when I can raise my hand and with the help of only one thought, translate my intentions into reality, will be the day when technology will really rise to a new level. Not earlier.

What, in my opinion, will happen: technology will disappear. They will go to the background, merge with walls, furniture and clothes, become smaller, but their functionality will expand. They will attract less attention, since their main goal will be to preserve our self-awareness, because, as we understand now, only the use of creativity can be automated. So let in your mind Ancient Greece arise instead of images from Blade Runner - ideas, not tools, will dominate.

In the future, technologies in their current form will not be important, because the main factor is autonomy - they should disappear the need for constant maintenance and refinement, because this will allow us to decide why we really want to use them. Technology will cease to be the ultimate goal and become a means of achieving something much more important.

5. Collective consciousness is both our greatest hope and most terrible fear

When people think about science fiction, images from space operas appear in their heads - huge spaceships flying through hyperspace, lasers, other planets. Star Trek, in short.

But no matter how exciting and fantastic cosmo-operas may be, I have always been most interested in the stories in which our “inner space” is explored. Science fiction has a unique opportunity to create thought experiments exploring our internal states. The human brain is not strong in abstractions - thinking easier to cope with stories that revolve around a plot that has a basis in the real world (hence the word "scientific").

Let me give you an example.

I noticed something very curious: in many books, one or another form of collective consciousness is the absolute fate of humanity. Whether we are talking about a planetary superorganism from the “Land of Foundation” or about communication through a nano-drug from Nexus, the idea of ​​combining our minds and experience has always been something sublimely utopian. I was shocked when I found out that there is a serious study of the possibility of "panpsychism" - the idea that everything in the Universe either has a mind or has the potential for its appearance.

But at the same time, it terrifies us. It is amazing how often the beetle-like, collective supermind becomes the enemy of humanity. Apparently, a swarm or a hive seems to us the antithesis of all that is human. The planetary superorganism from Solaris is not terrifying because it has some evil intentions, but because it does not have a central consciousness that we could understand. In the Ender Game, the worker beetles and the soldier beetles are remotely controlled by the queen (how often does this plot element appear in films - do you need to destroy the queen or supermind in order to turn off everyone else?). And, of course, we all remember the Borg Collective, which is especially scary, because it consists of creatures that once possessed individuals, but now lack them.

For me personally, this contradiction illustrates one of the central problems of mankind better than a million books on popular psychology. We make connections in the blink of an eye, but vulnerability is considered almost a threat to subsistence. Study after study, we are told that for happiness a person needs social relations - regardless of the time, culture, era or personality of the individual. So why is it so difficult to achieve happiness? Because relationships include short-term risk and only hope for certain acquisitions in the long run. Like the characters of space operas, we are forced to leave our comfort zone, even if the “spaceship” is just a table.

Collective consciousness is both our greatest hope and the most terrible fear. Perhaps the main obstacle to creating a “humanoid” intellect will not be how smart we are, but how contradictory we are.

6. Entanglement and chaos, not the size of transistors, will be the main obstacles in our path

This is how we see the future - that technology is our everything, that soon they will solve all our problems and enter all spheres of human life - this point of view has become the only correct opinion. Everything else is met with hostility.

I would not say that I am completely immune to it. Raymond Kurzweil’s book, “The Singularity Is Near,” has become for me an almost transcendent experience, the modern equivalent of pictures of the future seen through a magic ball. After all, the arguments are so strong, so self-evident, and at first glance, scientific (there are graphs!). Apparently, the danger of being left behind is growing, while being ahead of his time has become a merit. As a result, we are trying to outdo each other with predictions of future scientific breakthroughs (cars will drive on their own in ten years! No, in five!), As if only faith in a singularity would make it possible to become a part of it.

At the same time (and this bothers me very much), the only alternative to blind faith in an imminent singularity is fundamental mysticism - consciousness is an unsolvable mystery, the human mind is a black box that does not obey the laws of physics. So we perceived the Universe until Copernicus erased these stupidities into powder.

But what does science fiction say about this? Can it help us imagine possible alternatives to a slow and glorious approach to utopia without resorting to mysticism?

Here is just one example of such a scenario:

There is a possibility that human consciousness cannot be simulated, but not because it is incomprehensible, but because it is too confused. Our understanding (not to mention management) of complex systems cannot be called complete (recall the flight of Malaysia Airlines 370, the financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the Snowpocalypse of 2015).

This is the foundation of chaos theory: complex systems are not linear; the causes and effects inside them cannot be represented in the form of vectors and simply transferred to a phenomenon of any scale. There are certain fixation points - places where action and reaction reach their critical values, such as a situation where you hit a miniature golf ball only slightly stronger than your partner, as a result of which the ball hardly overcomes the hill and goes into a new labyrinth of obstacles and tunnels .

I remember, once in a book on chaos theory, I saw one intriguing idea, which states that there are systems so intricate that they cannot be modeled. For example, problems that can only be solved using algorithms that operate in super-polynomial time, and this, if (very) briefly, means that the time required to implement them increases exponentially depending on the number of incoming requests, which makes them completely impractical .

Imagine that human consciousness suddenly turns out to be such a problem - we realize that it is a system that cannot be modeled, which means that achievements in computing or recursive self-improvement do not mean anything to it. Even if we manage to create computers that are equivalent in all respects to our brains, they will have to constantly work in this scenario. They will be limited not only by the "number of angels dancing on a pin head", but by the very principles of the logic on which they work.

What an irony!

_{* The main translation of the second part was made by Artem Ignatyev , permission to publish on Geektimes was obtained from the author of the original text Tiago Forte , translation of the first part and revision of the second Kpyto}