A thousand years is just a thousand revolutions of the planet Earth around the Sun. In other words, on a cosmic scale - an instant … And during this instant, human civilization has made an information explosion.
When I read in the Russian, and even in the world press, arguments about the upcoming and even imminent “decline of America”, which will be replaced in the role of “global leader” either by one and a half billion communistically organized Chinese, or by someone else, it makes me not even funny, but sad - how intelligent and seemingly even informed people are ready to take what they wish for reality.
USA: A massive technological breakthrough is being prepared in decaying America that will determine the future of humanity
I do not mean at all that Pax Americana will exist indefinitely or even for the next thousand years. But that it is in the United States of America, and not elsewhere, that a grandiose technological breakthrough is being prepared, which will determine the future of humanity, I personally have no doubts.
Yes, America has rapidly de-industrialized in recent years, moving the main production outside its own territory - mainly to the countries of Southeast Asia and China. Yes, she got into enormous debts in order to maintain social stability on her own territory and feed tens of millions of citizens who, in fact, were left without work.
But in America over the past twenty years, such an innovative "fist" has been assembled from about five million intellectuals from all over the world, the likes of which, perhaps, cannot be found in the entire history of mankind.
And the results of his work have already formed into a single "puzzle" that will set new standards of life for the entire human civilization and which is fundamentally irreproducible on the previous technological basis.
I will only outline some of these technologies.
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ROBOTIZATION
In the automotive industry, robots have been used for a long time and everywhere, this no longer surprises anyone.
American manufacturers, as a rule, do not fire an assembly line worker, wait for him to retire, and when this happens, a robot takes this job. There are already fully automated factories, for example, for the assembly of televisions.
A truck with cassettes drives up to the plant, where parts and assemblies for assembling a TV are laid. The robots take out these cassettes and hang them on the conveyor, and the ready-made TVs are put into the truck.
There are no people in the assembly shops, the lights are off, the heating and ventilation are turned off - the robots do not need them. Once every two or three weeks, they stop everything, turn on the light and ventilation - adjusters come …
More and more such factories will appear.
Practically, of all industries where manual labor can be replaced with robots and manipulators, people with "simple" professions (the notorious proletariat in another word - ER) will be fired in the near future.
Why? The robot can be turned on for one hour or not turned off for a whole day, you can give it the command to work slower or several times faster.
The owner of such an enterprise has completely new economic opportunities: he can increase or decrease the volume of production with minimal losses (no need to pay overtime, no need to pay health insurance and social security taxes, no need to bargain with the trade union, etc.) - in other words, serve the market more accurately and efficiently.
Robots appear in more and more new spheres of human activity. A separate topic is combat robots, when, for example, military operators (you cannot call them soldiers in the usual sense of the word), being in California, use joysticks to control drones flying over Afghanistan.
Ladies in the US are now raving about new car models that automatically park. Leaving the car in a place convenient for you, you press a button on the keychain - and the car itself finds a parking space and enters there itself. The use of robot cars has already begun. Estimate how much money transport companies will save on salaries …
That is, the American economy in the coming years will begin to get rid of professions with low qualifications. All industries requiring the use of low-skilled manual labor are transferred to other countries, where this labor is still cheap.
But if technologies for automatic production appear, these industries remain in the United States. In the coming years, they will start selling cleaning robots, waiter robots, bartenders, nurses, nannies, secretaries and many, many others.
The question is, what about people who cannot work otherwise? Everything is in accordance with the well-known words of Lenin: study, study and study again!
Now in the United States during the economic crisis, private colleges and universities are one of the most profitable types of business. People who have lost their jobs try to improve or change their qualifications and find a new area for their efforts. These areas exist, are expanding, and workers in them are more than in demand.
Science and new knowledge increase the efficiency of the activity of each individual person.
"DIGITIZING" THE MAN
There are over two billion different computing devices in the world now: from super-computers and computing complexes with hundreds of thousands of servers to tablets and cell phones, which are full-fledged computers. All computers without software systems are just pieces of iron.
It is the software systems that control the computer in such a way that it provides some functionality, the range of which is simply fantastic: from controlling nuclear reactors and spacecraft to ensuring the work of teams of people at enterprises and providing EVERY person with access to knowledge and virtual communication.
In the near future, software systems will appear that will allow a person to communicate with a computer without a mouse and keyboard: with the help of voice, hand movements, facial expressions, etc., in the same way as we communicate with ourselves today …
The computer will become a real "friend" of man.
On the other hand, it is already possible to create a digital robot that will portray its owner - and not only externally, but also semantically: that is, it will answer questions and act in different situations as its owner would.
Already now you can see how your child will look - even before his birth, you can try on clothes on the screen without changing clothes, or see yourself with a new hairstyle. In my opinion, the main effect of such “digitization” of a person will manifest itself with the advent of software systems for continuous automatic training of a person from an early age and for the rest of his life.
First of all, this will enable a person to acquire new knowledge and new professional skills in a minimum of time. A person will not be afraid of robots, he will do what robots cannot do and, first of all, engage in research and design of new technologies.
In practice, we are talking about creating a KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY. Knowledge and skills have always been the main value of a person, and the automation of learning will lead to completely new, yet difficult to predict results.
But what is already clear is that the human environment has already become DIGITIZED, CALCULATED, PROGRAMMABLE, and this will lead to an unprecedented increase in labor productivity and economic efficiency.
We could not even dream about it, for example, fifty years ago … The surplus value of manual labor is becoming a thing of the past, new knowledge and technologies are the environment for creating surplus value.
Politicians, economists, philosophers will have to seriously "break" their heads on this topic - all the more so as an artificial, "digital" person will increasingly come closer and merge with a biological person - until complete indistinguishability and individual immortality in the form of a "digital matrix" embodied into various material substrates.
GENETIC SPACE
Everyone knows about DNA and about the double helix. I want to give you some simple facts. The double helix of DNA in a human cell is in a folded state and occupies about five thousandths of a cubic millimeter.
But if we turn this double helix into a line, then we get a segment almost two meters long. One person's body can contain up to about 100 trillion cells. If the DNA spirals of all cells of one person are drawn out and arranged in one line, then the length of this line will be equal to approximately several tens of distances from the Earth to the Sun.
The genetic complexity of all living things is such that, in my opinion, it really stores the "INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNIVERSE" - any information about aliens must be sought not only in space, but also within oneself.
Scientists began to engage in molecular computing in biological environments.
It's about creating literally living computers. It is too early to talk about how and how they will help a person. But we are definitely on the verge of entering the genetic space. For example, the British writer Christian Bok has devoted several years to the study of programming and molecular biology.
He coded his own poem into the genome of Escherichia coli. It took him four years to create this "genetic code". He achieved that the sequence of amino acids in a protein synthesized from the sequence of the first line of his poem could be turned into the second line, etc., using a different code, where certain combinations of amino acids encoded letters of the alphabet.
Imagine this: you have synthesized a living cell, which reproduces the first line of the novel "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy, at the next division - the second, etc. All cells born will contain all the lines of the novel.
Well, what's wrong with that? - you ask.
I will answer: if a person enters the genetic space and learns to enter his information there, then it will be possible not only to make cyborgs and live up to a thousand years, but also to create artificial ecological systems that can "work" from almost any source of energy, including sunlight and move freely even in outer space, not to mention the Earth, with its poles, mountains, deserts and oceans.
What can we say about the problems of hunger, disease and poverty?
SOCIETY MANAGEMENT
Society management technologies are based on technologies for managing a person, his interests and needs. However, the best form of governance is creation.
Modern management technologies are infinitely far from the very popular "horror stories" about "electronic concentration camps" and consist primarily in the formation of specified spectra of interests and needs within the information field.
Of course, no one canceled "penetrating" technologies like mind reading based on scanning the electrical activity of the human brain, but such individual work will be necessary unless in exceptional cases - the main role will be played by information distribution technologies that "cut off" data arrays uninteresting to a person and teach it in a given direction.
The fact that only a thousand years ago, no more than three percent of its population could read and write on Earth, speaks about how quickly a person develops and how surprisingly quickly he explores nature and society, how pragmatically he uses new knowledge in everyday life …
A thousand years is just a thousand revolutions of the planet Earth around the Sun. In other words, on a cosmic scale - an instant … And during this instant, human civilization has made an information explosion.
In other words, people are extremely efficient.
I think this natural phenomenon is not yet fully realized. We are busy with our current problems and are trying to find the most optimal solutions for them. Solving problems associated, for example, with social structure, is actually an attempt to find the most effective way of living together, providing a way and standard of living acceptable to the vast majority of people.
When people cannot find a joint acceptable social structure, protests, strikes, revolutions, wars, etc. begin. States divide people, and this still leads to the creation of various ideological, political and other "camps", as well as to their confrontation, sometimes reaching the use of weapons of mass destruction …
But man has already found a scientific and technological solution opposing the "camps" - this is the exchange of information, the adoption of "virtual" joint decisions that are capable of rebuilding the entire social structure on Earth.
For example, in Facebook alone today, about 800 million people exchange information every day, make joint decisions, sometimes organize public riots and demonstrations, etc. Nobody dreamed of such an opportunity even 20 years ago, and this is just the beginning.
The Internet will “kill” all the “camps”, and later the states will disappear too …
The Americans began to create the Internet for themselves in the sixties of the last century (the first models of networks were created by the Pentagon), it appeared as a result of the achievements of mathematics, physics, cybernetics, information and communication theory, computing and, most importantly, thanks to the desire of people to communicate freely. The Internet is the result of long and difficult research by thousands of scientists in various countries, in the very "camps" I spoke about above.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that states and their "camps" spend huge amounts of money on research to use scientific results in their own interests, scientific achievements become available to all mankind, and on the basis of these achievements it reorganizes the social structure.
In other words, the states and their "camps" fell into a systemic contradiction, since the achievements of science are ultimately, on the example of the Internet, used against them. This is precisely one of the fundamental roles of science in the development of mankind.
In the next 10-15 years we will witness the struggle of states, "camps" to maintain their positions. Look, for example, at the "Arab Spring", and this is just the beginning …
INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION
Of course, within the framework of this short article, I tried to focus only on the most important points of the new technological order that is being formed in the United States today, leaving aside the related problems of energy, transport, communications, defense systems, etc., which are usually focused on as writing and reading people.
As for the quite obvious contradiction between my two theses:
that a new technological system will be formed and will begin to spread from the territory of the United States, providing them with the usual role of a global leader for the near future, and that the development of a new technological system will lead to the gradual withering away of states and nations, I must note that any the real process is taking place within the framework of the collision of two opposite tendencies, but the wheel of progress, in general, is rolling forward, and, of course, the United States, breaking the usual boundaries of national sovereignty, is also preparing its own death as a sovereign state.
This process will take, in my opinion, a whole historical era, and if humanity managed to stop on the brink of a thermonuclear war, which threatened not only with billions of victims, but also with the destruction of our planet as a cosmic body, it will find an optimal way out of the current, very contradictory, tragic, but not at all a hopeless situation for all of us.
Is America preparing for a tremendous technological breakthrough that will determine the future of humanity?
Valery Medvedev One of the founders of the Soviet school of programming