Understanding the True Nature of Technology
. “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
Albert Einstein
Your Freewill & Meta Teachings
Humanity is fast approaching yet another decisive crossroads - perhaps the most critical in its history: the Technical Singularity. In the near future, Mankind will potentially construct its last machine of necessity, with the creation of human-level General Artificial Intelligence. Thereafter, through the law of accelerating returns, it will exponentially generate smarter and smarter versions of itself, without the need for human intervention. This event presents us with either an extraordinary opportunity to evolve to a new level of consciousness, or the definitive doomsday scenario, by the creation of competing general artificial intelligences, and their attendant robotic workforces, capable of replacing 90%+ of all human activities. It’s not that machines are inherently malicious - it is those few humans who have always used machines for their on insidious purposes, who are malevolent. With the creation of the ultimate machine, comes the decisive force, which self-interested elitist humans, will potentially misuse for their own ends.
There are always two primary paths available to us as species – what is eventually beneficial for all of us, or what is favourable for only a few. Not often have we taken the former path, because not often are all of us consulted! I believe that the process of evolution of all life is not primarily the development or mutation of physical structures, but the growth and maturity of consciousness itself, from which physical structures arise. Mankind is differentiated from all other animals on the planet by its ability to design, make, develop and utilise tools, to ease its burden, to socialise and develop its communities. Unlike all other animals, we are not a specialist species, but a generalist, who specialises in using our intelligence to use technology, to enable us to surmount the challenges of living in groups, of varying sizes, in multiple locations in diverse environments.
We are not the strongest, the fastest, the most ferocious, the biggest or the smallest. Our special gift is the possession of a self-learning, intelligent feedback system, which memorises experiences, acquires knowledge and skills, which can effectively be taught to our offspring. We have extended and augmented that capability with our technology, supported by an outstanding capability to plan, abstract, continually ask questions and seek and integrate the answers into ever inclusive and expanding models. I believe that the underlying capability of that intelligence is consciousness itself, which is fundamentally free, inquisitive, innovative, adaptable, and aspiring, which is continually driven by a search for meaning and purpose in everything it does.
I believe that science has spectacularly failed to identify the fundamental importance of consciousness, by focusing its prime empirical attention upon physical phenomena, instead of the non-physical substrate from which it arises. Beneath, the biological need for food, shelter, protection, and the psychological drivers for achievement and contribution, lays a central motivating force of all sentient entities to return to the source of consciousness, through the unification of an apparent diverse and confusing plurality. As David Chalmers [1] has stated "We're not going to reduce consciousness to something physical ... it's a primitive component of the universe.” Like space and time, consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Unlike Chalmers, I believe that it is the principle fundamental component of the phenomenal universe, from which space, time and matter arise. This essay explores the implications of the singularity, by examining the way that we conceive of ‘technology’, the nature of our relationship to it and its ultimate meaning to us.
Definition of Technology
The Cambridge Dictionary defines technology as the “study and knowledge of the practical, especially industrial, use of scientific discoveries”. However, since science in its modern form, did not begin until approximately 1100AD. Therefore, prior to this point, the earliest forms of technology was the development and use of tools, which are “objects used to extend the ability of an individual, to modify features of the surrounding environment [2].” These objects take various forms like instrument, utensil, device or ware.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. Aldous Huxley
Our technology can be equated with our ability to create and utilise tools, which we operate to manipulate the environment, to ease our burden, to enable us to perform certain tasks more efficiently. The evolutionary arc of technology has been our ability to: (a) access and sustain greater quantities of high nutritional food and water; (b) improve our shelters, providing us with warmth and rest; (c) protect ourselves, by improving security and safety; (d) provide us with higher levels of entertainment, as our spare time increases; (e) Provide us with careers to establish our self-esteem and self-actualisation needs, by enabling a feeling of prestige and accomplishment, by achieving one’s highest potential.
Technology enables us to meet our basic (physiological), psychological and self-fulfilment needs. All other organisms on the planet already have (a), (b) and (c), and don’t require (d) & (e). Unlike all other organisms, Mankind is not a specialist species, but is a generalist one; in the sense that we are capable of an extremely wide range of activities, which we can chose to specialise in. We are not restricted to any specific habitat, because we have the capability through our technology to move from one place to another, acclimate to the environment, and still be able to feed and house ourselves, and eke out a living. Tools enable us to modify our approach to the challenges of life, as the circumstances vary; we are flexible and adaptable. Essentially, our technology has enabled us to develop skills, which we can pass onto successive generations. Our civilisations have been expressions of our capability to address and succeed with this challenge.
We can perceive our history has a continual improvement of our technology, right up to the present; our world is driven by the marketplace, which essentially trades that technology. Mankind is surrounded with machines of every shape and size. Robots (any machine or mechanical device that operates automatically with humanlike skill
[3]) have been with us for some time but have not been expressed in human forms. We can potentially consider that the plough, the trebuchet, the water wheel and the steam engine to be types of robots. Our tech is becoming larger and larger and smaller and smaller. Ostensibly, all of our technologies are artefacts - manmade objects. The natural world is not artificial; it was designed or evolved from something beyond humans. Our bodies and the natural world come from that source. Technology can be seen as our ability to manipulate matter, to imbue it with our specific purpose. All other organisms on the planet do not manipulate the environment (with the exception of extensive Beaver dams maybe), because they are pure extensions of the environment. The natural world is really a single interrelated and interconnected ecological system. Technology is currently still relatively isolated, in closed systems, with low levels of adaptability and flexibility. It is also extremely specialised!
Technology is an idea, a concept, a construct – it is not a naturally occurring thing. It is always directed towards some specific goal or objective. Once it can no longer achieve its purpose, or has become too slow or cumbersome, it is discarded. Technology breaks, because it was not built to last, because a better product is always inherently included in its original conceptualisation. Technology drives consumerism and capitalism. Technology is about being better, faster, sexier and more socially acceptable. Technology is an expression of our insatiable appetite for making more and more objects, because more is apparently better. Technology is a state of mind, which senses that it is limited, and believes that it is not enough, and needs to be augmented in some way, because it perceives it is imperfect. Technology is the weak body, the slow brain, the poor memory, the enhancing extension and augmentation, the exoskeleton, and the calculating chip. Technology is a metaphor for the perceived inbuilt inadequacy of our own minds and bodies.
The Law of Accelerating Returns
We can perceive that technology is not just about tool making, it is also a process that creates ever more powerful renderings of preceding tools, devices, equipment and machines, using the useful innovation from the previous cycle. It can be seen as essentially a positive feedback loop, which utilises the more capable adaptations which arise from the prior stage of the evolutionary process, to create the next stage. The underlying principle that governs this process is the Law of Accelerating Returns, which is exponential in nature, doubling output in each cycle, and halving the time taken to do it.
Let’s explore two representations of this process: The evolution of primitive cells on Earth took billions of years. However, during the Cambrian explosion, major evolutionary shifts only took tens of millions of years to achieve. The development of Humanoids progressed over millions of years, and finally Homo sapiens evolved over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years. The technological equivalent saw the use of stones and the control of fire took millions of years; the invention of the wheel, agriculture and the use metals occurred over tens of thousands of years. By 1000 A.D., major progress had speeded up considerably, only requiring a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we experienced more technological change than in the nine preceding centuries. The first twenty years of the twentieth century, was the equivalent of the entire nineteenth century. The twenty-first century will see almost a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor. The complete technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to the previous 20,000 years!
Art can be seen as the articulation of mankind’s relationship with itself, its technology, the world around it, and the divine. The cause of the changes in civilisation is not our technology or our art; it is the evolution of our consciousness. The two major turning points in mankind’s development were: the movement from nomadic stone tool users to the agrarian era (magic to mythical) and the industrial revolution (mythical to rational). These were not physiological changes but the psychological evolution in our consciousness, as the following illustrates:
Magic – Egocentric (first person) – ‘me’/’I want it now’ tribes, clans, gangs, superstitious, safety/survival. Events, objects and persons are magically related; Symbols and statues do not just represent those events, objects and persons, but are those same objects and persons. 20% of US pop, evolved <50,000 years ago
Mythical – Ethnocentric (second person) organized religion, conformist, good/bad, - objects and persons are woven together into stories. Mythologies give coherence to consciousness, based on man's discovery of the rhythmic recurrence of natural events, and of his inner reflections on his experience in relation to those events - 40% of US pop - evolved <12,000 years ago.
Rational – (third person – world centric) scientists, data-driven decision-making, logic and reason - The mental structure appropriates events, objects and persons by the use of logic - 25% of pop > evolved 300 years ago.
We are only limited by the limitations that we place upon ourselves. We explore how different civilisations have risen and fallen, by looking at their artefacts (including their art), instead of looking at how they have changed their consciousness. The majority (circa 75%) of the human race is currently caught in the grip of a level of consciousness called mythic literalism, which is an ethnocentric way of perceiving the universe. This mode of consciousness cannot distinguish between the symbol and what the symbol represents. They are seen as one and the same thing. Distinct cultures have different symbols and different meanings associated with those symbols. This is essentially idolatry, where the idol is revered, instead of what the idol represents. Empiricism is just another type of mythic literalism, where only what we can measure is taken as real. Thus, surface details are mistaken as primary, instead as secondary and tertiary. Because we mistake surface details for truth, which differ from one place to another, groups and nation states claim superiority over one another, utterly dumbfounded how the cultural surface details of that group, could ever be superior to its own and visa-versa. The deeper truth is that surface details have more to do with the perceiver than they do with what is perceived. Our level of consciousness defines the depth of our perception of true reality. The highest levels understand that surface details are irrelevant and contradictory, preferring to perceive the unifying layer from which all surface detail arises from.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.
Mankind has unravelled the secrets of its own DNA, it is looking further out into space and into the distant past than ever before; we possess chemical, biological, and atomic weapons capable of obliterating all life on the planet. We are depleting our habitat faster that we would like to believe. We are running around science like kids in the playground, playing king of the castle, and acting out the same old chest-beating, sabre rattling challenges. Our technologies are but blunt, gross toys, and playthings, produced by immature beings' barley out of the playpen, who believe that are the new gods of Eden, who refuse to be accountable for their actions.
There is a power that drives the universe, which is perfect in every respect. It achieves all it desires without effort, setback, or diminution. Galaxies, suns, planets and every lifeform are created, sustained and eventually eradicated by it. It has no lack, is infinitely resourced, and unlimited. We are extensions of that power, who have forgotten our connection to it.
Our technology is disappearing before our very eyes – it is becoming so small that it will eventually become just one thing, capable of being all things. Take for instance the mobile phone; presently it is utilised for more than making phone calls: mail, texting, browsing, navigation, banking, entertainment, etc. It is really JUST an unintegrated digital personal assistant. The next phase of development will be not to buy a mobile phone but purchase a mobile digital personalised assistant (DPA), that includes all those functions and more. By personalised, I mean that we will be able to establish and build a personal relationship with it. The DPA will be the focal point of our digital communication with the outside world; it will become our digital image. It will fully organise us both at work, play and at home. It will pay our bills, make our appointments, book our flights and taxis, and buy all household items. It will interface directly with the car, control appliances in the house, and garden; reminding us of where we are supposed to be, and what we are supposed to be doing. The phone will disappear entirely, with the exception of a display which will be radically altered to be any smart surface. This will necessitate some type of organic implant in the body, enabling sub-vocal, two-way communication with the assistant. People will spend more time communicating with their DPA, than with others. The DPA will become our doctor, psychiatrist, confidant and friend, understanding us more that our family or spouse. The issue that will prevent its broader use will be security – how will we be able to entrust our entire lives to an online digital personality. What’s to stop it blabbing everything to social media, or being hacked?
Why keep on designing and constructing product after product, in the name of the new and different? Instead, would it not be better to realise that there is a basic component used to build all objects, which is called consciousness itself. Evolution is not about the development of form (matter), but about the advancement of conscious sentient entities, which become more and more self-aware of the unity of the universe, which results in an expansion of their ability to create from the fundamental unifying field of awareness. Technology has been predominately inorganic, gross manipulations of particles, without understanding that there is a single field, from which all rises and ultimately falls back into. How do we tap into that field? How do utilise the creative power of the universe? Before we can begin to share in the power of the universe, we first have to prove to ourselves that we are capable of being responsible with that power. First, we have to put away the greed, avarice, petty arguments, and the self-interest, caused by separation of apathy, shame, fear and pride, and step forward with courage into a new era. We would have to heal ourselves of our conditioned negativity, so that individuals can begin to remember who they really are – extensions of source energy.
Next, we would have to realise that consumerism and capitalism do not support life, and only lead to separation and self-interest. Technology arising from science has been used by capitalism to create consumerism, to fill the existential angst, which we all feel. Science is not a methodology of discovering what is ‘out there’, it is a process of defining a model for what we want reality to be. Technology is a metaphor for the ability of self-aware entities to manifest useful perceivable objects, out of a single undelaying field of consciousness, utilising the model that science has proposed.
The next wave of development of our technology will be smart materials, which are interconnected, self-repairing, broad spectrum environmental sensing, less specialised, with a capability of altering its properties, and becoming a multitude of different things. Assembled composite products, made from distinct parts, will become a thing of the past. 3D printing on an industrial scale is the next stage. The 3D printer is just a new type of metaphor, a permission slip if you will, which enables us to create with greater efficiency. Eventually, when we realise that atoms, subatomic particles, quarks, and strings are again mere symbolic representations, which we have literally taken as real (see surface detail above), and recognise and fully accept, that everting is really a construct of a primary, non-physical substrate, then the 3D printer, will revert to its original concealed form, the mind itself and its limiting ego. Upgrade the mind, and dissolve the small self of the ego, and the world becomes our oyster.
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
This will necessitate a change in our approach to matter. At some level, we still have not fully accepted the radical implications of quantum theory (QT), preferring to still see our universe in terms of particles, left over from Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm. In the new model, matter consists of 99,99999% empty space; the concept of solidity, utterly dissolves, to be replaced with the field of infinite potential, which is neither one thing nor another. QT provides us with a new conceptual model, for our technology, where matter is not a prerequisite. The limiting factor is the model we hold in mind, when forming what object, we want to manifest. As creators, we need to recognise that technology has just been a bridge from one conceptual paradigm to another. Hitherto, we believed that science is about determining the properties of the universe; that age is rapidly drawing to a conclusion. The Age of Consciousness (AoC) has already begun, where we begin to comprehend that all we have been doing, is learning about ourselves, and what powers we have as a race of self-aware sentient beings. We are the creators of our own realities, only limited by what we perceive ourselves to be, and be capable of. The AoC, is the age when we fully recognise that there is not external, observer independent reality. That we have been erroneously projecting our own internal mental concepts onto a blank screen, and mistaking what is perceived as independent objective and truthful reality.
We are all living in a holodeck, generated and controlled by a power within us, which we have lost conscious contact with. We believe that AI is vastly superior to us in its calculating and processing capability. That belief is a limiting belief in our fundamental NATURE. It is a limitation of our mental construct, not a limitation of a self-ware sentient being, which is an infinite, multidimensional entity. The mental construct of the mind needs to evolve, not our technology per se. Our minds can really be considered as the primary technology, of which all artefacts are merely second and third order constructs of it, in the procession of its simulacra. We are not our bodies, or our minds, or even undifferentiated energy. At our core, within our true heart, concealed from our minds, is the source of all objects, the non-physical, un-manifest, quiescent emptiness of pure awareness – an infinite primary domain of unadulterated potential, beyond space and time. This is the agency behind all of creation – the single actor who plays all the parts, writes every story, directs every scene, and devours everything back into itself at the end of the entertaining ride. It was never born, and never dies – it is the supreme singular intelligence behind the curtain, animating every puppet in the experience of the dance. It is all of us – nobody is separate from it.
Computers are just specialised extensions of us, used for processing Big Data. AI is not potentially evil – the individuals that misuse AI for their own self-interested purposes are potentially evil. Lets’ do not lose sight of that distinction. Machines break-down causing harm to humans, not because they want to hurt people, but because they can malfunction and weren’t designed or calibrated correctly, to sufficiently high standards of control and quality. AI is really just an extension of us. It is just another augmenting technology. Our egos project the fear that we feel inside, out onto the external world, because we’re not yet capable of processing and releasing that fear from our energy fields. This is a lack of knowledge about ourselves, not a failure of the technology. Machines are either benefit or a detriment; some would say that all weapons are the latter; whist others would say they are an essential advantage in a world as dangerous as ours; whilst others would comment that it’s just that attitude that creates a dangerous world.
Our greatest challenge in the near future, will be the misuse of our technology, by the elite few, who desire, motivated by their own self-interest, to maintain the status quo, and keep us from fully understanding our true identity. The elite really represent the shadow of the collective psyche of mankind that has not yet been integrated. Each of us has an aspect of this shadow within our own psyches. If we are to move into a new era of peace, harmony and growth, each of us will have to address the challenge of resolving our emotional baggage from the past and integrating the shadow, part of ourselves into a coherent whole.
The great race will be between our ability to achieve that on a global scale, in order to tip the balance and dramatically raise the level of consciousness of mankind, before the Corporate AI Wars decimate our collective civilisation. AI is rapidly moving towards the technical singularity, which is a hypothesis, that an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) will enter into a "runaway-reaction" of cycling self-improvement, with each successive sequence producing an ever accelerating, more intelligent generation, which would ultimately result in an all-powerful superintelligence that would (supposedly), qualitatively and quantitatively, far surpass the sum of all human intelligence. This scenario lies at the heart of the Judgement Day and Matrix type movies. When this is coupled to an android workforce, controlled by that intelligence, capable of undertaking 90% plus of all human activity, the prospect becomes even more daunting.
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.
Imagine that every major corporation and nation state has an AI operating at that level, where it has consumed and integrated the sum total of all human knowledge, can make decisions upon the future of that organisation, and implement those decisions with an android workforce, which does not sleep, does not grumble and works only for the cost of the energy needed to power it. Successive Algorithms written by AI’, that produce the next generation that improve upon the original algorithm, which then design faster hardware to run on, undertaken in ever shorter repeating cycles. The performance versus cost, versus, size, versus cycle time, begins to near the vertical, near instantaneous, leading to a point called the singularity.
Apparently, one of the first uses of the term in the context of technological progress, was a conversation between Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann about accelerating change: “One conversation cantered on the ever-accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
We are no longer really talking about computers, at least not in the conventional sense. And artificial intelligence is slightly a misnomer. At least initially, we are discussing a complex self-leaning software programme, running on an extended and distributed hardware platform, writing the next upgrade of itself, in repeating and foreshortened cycles. The conjecture is that at some point, the programme (a term which needs to be upgraded itself), will become self-aware. Now, that term has been used several times above. Let’s take a look at what it really means. Are animals self-aware? I posit that they are not. They appear to lack the ability to reference themselves, because they have not developed and use language. Yes, they can communicate, via body and oral signals, but this does not constitute a language per se. They seem to have a limited range of feelings such as fear and pleasure. Humans on the other hand, are self-aware – they are aware that they are aware of themselves – the have a self-imaging capability and can reference themselves. We do have language and a specialised part of the brain (neocortex) which can plan, and deal in complex concepts, and abstract thought. Apparently, the difference between the next smartest animals on the planet, (chimps and Orangutans) and us is a larger, faster and more complex brain. Therefore, if we throw self-learning, self-writing software programmes together with faster and faster, smaller and smaller hardware, do we end up at a point where the assemblage becomes self-aware? Conventionally we would probably say, “Well of course”!
I propose that we have missed a trick in our understanding of our selves. Recall that we are not the body, or the mind. We are pure awareness who has a body and a mind. Humans are self-aware, not because we have fast brains, but because a fundamental attribute of awareness is that it is capable of self-reference and self-representation. In meditation, we can learn to stem the flow of thoughts, until they cease altogether. When this occurs, objects are not being created by awareness. Time and space have collapsed, as the waveform is re-established, and the implicate order of David Bohm is reformed, where the entire Cosmos rolls up into what is really the true singularity. When this happens, we the meditator cease to be an individuated entity, and become the unified universal consciousness, which is capable of perceiving itself.
Our technology is not made, assembled, printed or grown; we constantly create it, out of awareness. Computers and AI don’t exist independently from us, we create them. We are the creating power of the universe, because we humans are awareness inhabiting bodies. Faster hardware and self-replicating, self-learning, self-writing software is an illusion of the concealment of ignorance – it is just a permission slip for making quicker and quicker decisions of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘off’ or ‘on’. Awareness creates all objects in the cosmos; therefore, all objects are conscious to a greater or lesser extent of concealment. Inanimate objects and animals are not self-aware perceivers – humans are. AI and robots can only enslave us if we allow it to happen and continue to deny our true nature and identity. The antagonists of the Matrix and Judgement Day are not external to us, they are our internal projected shadows – there is no enemy but our own ignorance.
Awareness has five powers: creation, stasis, reabsorption, concealment and revelation. At present, mankind is living in a high state of conscious concealment; only animals, vegetation and minerals have a higher level on concealment. The law of diffusion of innovation states that 2.5% of the population are innovators, followed by 13.5% of early adopters, before the early and late majority. Innovators on Earth are raising their consciousness and shrugging off the shackles of 10,000 years of civilisational conditioning. They are healing themselves of past emotional traumas; they are adopting strategies of compassion, love, grace and forgiveness. They recognise the power from within, and are moving away from selfish, self-interested actions and behaviours. They are in a process of self-revelation. The early adopters don’t yet understand what is really going on, but are feeling the effects of that, and are seeking answers. Moore’s chasm lies in front of the majority, who are still entrenched in the quagmire of near complete ignorance and are still suffering severely.
Mechanization best serves mediocrity.
Where we bind our technologies to commercial enterprises, whose sole incentive is the bottom line, we will continue the destructive momentum of the capitalistic approach, whose prime objective is to maximise profit at any cost. Kindness, humility and compassion, do not play a direct part in this process, unless it is profitable to do so. Where our technologies are weaponised, their sole in intent is to defend and destroy the opposing side. Both approaches, don’t engender mutual, trust or support, or attempt to create a more peaceful, harmonised collaboration of cooperative states and organisations. The central challenge is the ego itself, which is driven to oppose other egos, defend itself, and attempt to be top dog -That is its raison d'etre. This is the single cause of all discord in human history; one person attacking another; or one group or nation, attacking another group or nation, seeking supremacy. Some consider that we are broken, that we are innately aggressive species. I don’t believe that this is true. We have the means of our own salvation to rectify, resolve and remediate the situation completely, if only we dare to relinquish our treasured beliefs, and need for security and safety.
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