Now we have millions of players making micro decisions, none of which alone is as drastic as stripping the Earth of the Van Allen belts. Each one is simply making a micro-improvement in a browser, or a medical nanobot, or whatever. And together they raise the baseline level of technology in an irreversible way. Might as well call it Progress.

Seen from the outside, yeah, it looks like a virus-like self-replicating meme, followed possibly by virus-like self-replicating nanobots (gray goo theory), but there’s no central brain. This isn’t the type of fear of technology that I was writing about, but I do often wonder whether our technological development isn’t Nature’s way of protecting herself. We’ve clearly become cancerous to the planet — just fly over LA on a clear day and look at the sprawl — and we’ve also become overly specialized in one direction (our brains). There’s a parallel to the dinosaurs, whose evolutionary competition caused them to get bigger and more ecologically specialized until they became unstable. Add a trigger like a weather change and they go extinct because they’ve lost the ability to adapt.

Whether you believe in the meteor impact theory or not, the dinosaurs were ready to die out, with their strength becoming their own undoing. As a general principle I think people’s strengths and weaknesses are usually the exactly same attribute (e.g., in jiu-jitsu my strength gives me some advantages but it also makes me slower to learn technique as a consequence, and the muscle mass burns ATP faster than I can replenish it, which leads to cardio problems — one attribute translates into both a strength and a weakness). And I think the same was true of the dinosaurs (size) and of us (brains/technology). Our problem won’t be lack of adaptability but the fact that we’ve taken away ecological diversity (in a socio-cultural sense). The planet is now one cultural petri dish, and if one of those millions of people screw up their experiment, the whole dish will go. Meanwhile we’re creating hyper-specialized societies that weaken our mammalian adaptability in preference of an insect-like organization. (E.g., nobody on the first two World Trade Centre planes fought the terrorists because it wasn’t their job, they thought the experts would take care of it, etc.)

Still, as a species we’re incredibly adaptable, so it will take a major screw up to kill the petri dish. But with so many people working at it, it seems kind of inevitable, sooner or later.

What are your thoughts towards technology becoming it’s own entity and perhaps developing within itself to further its existence?? I mean, it is driven by human creativity. We continuously are seeking to make technology faster, more powerful, and more innovative. What is this need? The cell phone is already really really really good. But not good enough. What is this driving force behind technologies evolution? Capitalism? The ego? I don’t know. But there is no doubt that it is evolving at an exponential rate. This could get scary. So in conculsion, I agree.