The future for mankind, part 1: Homo Digitalis

Before I go any further, I should point out that – despite its title – this post is not going to deliver any new revelations about our future as a species. And I’m certainly not claiming to have the definitive answers here. But I have been following some really interesting theories for a while now, and I thought they were worth sharing.

Many of you will have heard of Ray Kurzweil, the futurist, inventor and now director of engineering at Google, who predicted, among other things, the rapid expansion of the Internet back in 1990. He then went on to popularise the concept of “the Singularity”, an era in which humans will merge with artificial intelligence, transcend our biological limitations and, ultimately, achieve immortality.

Whatever your views about Mr Kurzweil’s more advanced predictions (although I feel obliged to point out that he has previously enjoyed an 86 percent accuracy rate) it certainly looks increasingly likely that some of those relating to the near future will be validated.

This is because the basis for many of his theories lies in the exponential growth curve in computing power that we are witnessing right now. Just as one example, it’s nearly the time of year when we will find out about the latest performance of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The current frontrunner is China’s Sunway TaihuLight, which has a High Performance Linpack (HPL) rating of 93.0 petaflops.

For anyone not familiar with the cute-sounding petaflop – or HPL ratings for that matter – it is equal to a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating-point calculations per second. If your head isn’t hurting too much after considering that, compare the Sunway TaihuLight’s performance with that of the former supercomputing champion, the Tianhe-2, which has an HPL rating of 33.8 petaflops. Now, that’s what I call a growth curve.

Based on this, Mr Kurzweil’s proposal that by 2050, one thousand US dollars will buy a computer that has a billion times more intelligence than every human combined, doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched.

Because of the recent incredible advances in computing and other technologies, we have seen a resurgence of the old “man vs. machine” debate, which has tended to peak during our most intense phases of industrialisation. And in turn, our newsfeeds have started to rumble with headlines claiming that robots are going to take all of our jobs.

At the same time, several studies – such as this recent McKinsey report – put forward a more balanced viewpoint. While not denying that almost half of the activities that people are paid to do have the potential to be automated during the next few decades, they also argue that people will need to continue to work alongside their machine “colleagues”, and that where people are displaced by automation, they will find other employment as the nature of work changes.

I have to admit that it’s the idea of a combined human- and technology-driven workforce that really intrigues me, because we are already seeing it in action. Images like the one above, of Hyundai’s “wearable robot”, are becoming more and more familiar. While most of the exoskeleton suits currently in use were designed to slightly increase workers’ lifting capacity or prevent injuries, Hyundai employees testing the wearable robot can allegedly lift hundreds of kilograms, while the company says soldiers could use it to carry up to 50 kilograms of kit with them over long distances.

What’s coming next is even more fascinating however, because as we really start to embrace the power and potential of systems like artificial intelligence and virtual or augmented reality, the lines of distinction between the human and cyber worlds will start to blur – paving the way for the next phase of our evolution as digitally-enhanced humans, or “Homo Digitalis”. More on this in my next post…

Photo credit: Hyundai