Cyberpunks: The people of the future or the present?

Technological progress will change our lives soon

The report from the experts of the National fund of scientific research and Trade Ministry of the USA promised the shining future to the humanity in the field of high technologies.

Here you can find billions of minds, united into the single neuro-cybernet (Internet pales in comparison), long-living, almost immortality. The most interesting feature about this all is the fact that all this joy of the technical progress is likely to become real during the current century.

However, there is a condition, pursuant to which the government is supposed to allot considerable money to back up the research in the fields, which are between four sciences: biology, nanotechnology, information science, and the research in the field of cognitive systems.

Scientists say that the invested money will be paid back not as the improved condition of physical and mental state of American citizens, but it will be a very good response to the dangers of the past century: social and economic contradictions, the overpopulation of the planet, ecological problems and the issue of mass destruction weapon.

The materials that laid the basis of the report were collected during the conference, which took place in December of the year 2001 with the participation of the representatives of leading scientific institutions, governmental departments and American private companies.

The participants of the conference came to conclusion that the majority of discoveries in the field of convergent technologies could be done within the period of the coming twenty years.

Our generation will witness the invention of more efficient, “smart” robots, a human being will have an opportunity to get directly connected to a computer, putting an end to the career of a keyboard and a mouse. People will have sensor devices, which will be meant for the constant transmission of the information about their physical condition. Such sensors will be needed only on extreme occasions, since the majority of illnesses will leave modified human organisms forever.

Well, speaking frankly, we are basically offered to gradually disappear and to give way to the new informational thing, which can be compared with an ant hill. A global mind is surely a good thing, it’s exciting, but existentially it will mean death, not another life. Furthermore, it is rather probable that the rapid current of indigested information will sweep over a weak human mind. As Jeremy Rifkin said, the human nervous system is not meant for communication at the speed of light.

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov