We live at an interesting time, when the pace of advancement in technology is ever increasing, and it is becoming ever more important to anticipate the future in any developments we undertake.
In this document I speculate about the future in order to build product today which plays into that future.
If I consider by what means long term projections into the future might be possible, I come up with two tools which might give me some hope. The first is evolutionary thinking, since this has given us the best understanding of how life on earth has developed over the last 4 Billion years. The second is epistemological, because it is increasingly clear that knowledge is a crucial lever for advancement, and we may hope that fundamental epistemological insights have a durable relevance to the continuing evolution of intelligence, whether on this planet or beyond.
I will expand on each of these topics in turn and conclude by binding them into a synthesis.
The theory of evolution is now most closely associated with Charles Darwin, and is sometimes referred to as Darwinian Evolution. But Darwin’s evolution may be seen as narrowly cast, particularly oriented perhaps to showing that life could have evolved without the hand of God to guide it, but also in other ways terracentric. THe modern synthesis, incorporating significant parts of modern evolutionary science, is arguably less applicable both to the prebiotic evolution which lead to first life on earth and to the postbiotic evolution which may determine the future of non-biological intelligence, or the ongoing biological evolution in which synthetic biology begins to inject intelligent design into the genome.
Here we consider a conception of evolution broadened to cover such developments, which is:
The resulting evolutionary imperative is “proliferate”, and the expectation is that those features which are conducive to proliferation will predominate at the expense of those which do not.
When we project this into the future, we must anticipate evolution of the capability and the actuality of interstellar, and even intergalactic proliferation. By something. Likely nothing like life on earth. Something more optimal for covering large distances rapidly and taking root in environments totally alien to mankind.
Let us leave that there for the moment, and consider the second way in which we might predict the very long term future.
Mankind, as his culture has evolved since he first appeared on earth around a mere quarter of a million years ago, has accumulated knowledge about the world enabling him to control his environment for his benefit. As that knowledge has grown, it has also engendered abstraction, a way of extracting from large bodies of particular knowledge, general principles applicable to all.
Three phases in the progression of abstraction are worth noting in this context.