Jamais Cascio imagines life in the Nöocene, a new epoch in human history characterized by all manner of cognitive enhancements, in the form of drugs that make us smarter or better able to focus, artificial intelligence and sophisticated models that, running on the hardware of the future, will actually give us good advice about which decisions to make and where to focus our attention — in fact, in this imagined scenario, everything we focus our attention on may come pre-filtered by smart attention filters that we’ll come to see as extensions of ourselves. Cascio thinks we’ll be well on our way there already by 2030. This makes a good companion to that New Yorker piece on nootropics (neuroenhancing drugs) from a few months ago.
As always, I have a cautious, this is cool to think about and let’s by all means continue thinking about it and working toward it, but we’ll wait and see attitude to this whole thing. I don’t believe in the Singularity, exactly, but I’m not so dumb that I think the future will simply be a continuation of the trends that are obvious to everyone in the present. The best thing about being young today (about being young in any age with rapid innovation, really) is that we will actually live to see many of these predictions fail or succeed. Maybe when I’m ninety I’ll start making definite predictions, knowing that I won’t live to see them either vindicated or ridiculed anyway.
Jul 19, 2009