Last Fri­day, I and my friend Dave went bowl­ing. It was fun but it soon turned into some­thing else. He com­pletely and utterly destroyed me. I was infin­i­tes­i­mally hand­i­capped but I don’t hold that against him. He sim­ply got the bet­ter of me and won most of the games that evening. Any­way, after­wards we dropped into a nice pub where we drank some some beer and talked about lotta things. I brought up a topic which is cur­rently very inter­est­ing to me – Future Shock. It’s a word that every­body should know.

It’s all about reach­ing the Sin­gu­lar­ity which is a pre­dicted future event where a nor­mal human being won’t be able to under­stand tech­no­log­i­cal progress with­out aux­il­iary means. Even now there’s a huge per­cent­age of humans unable to com­pre­hend exist­ing tech­nolo­gies. That leads us to the impor­tant ques­tion: should the Sin­gu­lar­ity be viewed as a pos­i­tive event or a dan­ger­ous one? Should we work to has­ten it’s arrival or try to pre­vent it from hap­pen­ing – if that’s even pos­si­ble? I for one like tech­no­log­i­cal progress and the idea of intel­li­gence ampli­fi­ca­tion. Tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments have much to offer for humanity.

The down­side is that – as it is the case with almost every­thing – it can be abused. Peo­ple can use it to wreak more havoc, to influ­ence and con­trol other peo­ple, or to spy on every aspect of our lives. Just imag­ine, you got some implants allow­ing you to see things before your vir­tual eye just by think­ing of them and you’re read­ing the lat­est tech news your spawned agents have gath­ered on the web when, all of a sud­den, a pretty nasty com­mer­cial sneaks through your fire­wall and keeps annoy­ing you until you can finally adjust your fil­ters and ban it from your vision. You may now think that’s pretty straight-forward, and I agree. That doesn’t mean it won’t hap­pen in the next 20 years. I’d surely make use of such a tech­nol­ogy if could get my hands on it.

Ulti­mately, it all comes down to band­width and that’s what peo­ple in First World coun­tries are in the process of being served. Over the last decade, the demand for high band­width con­nec­tions has grown rapidly and there’s no end in sight. Dig­i­tal dis­tri­b­u­tion is becom­ing ever more impor­tant in our daily lives and peo­ple like to access their stuff from every­where. As a heavy inter­net user I own a high speed con­nec­tion (cur­rently capped at 8 Mbit/s) which is more than suf­fi­cient for my needs but it still is very far from offer­ing instan­ta­neous results. I’d very much like to see a phe­nom­e­non called quan­tum entan­gle­ment being uti­lized for trans­fer­ring infor­ma­tion. Right now, it may be uncon­ceiv­able but I’m con­vinced that I’m gonna see that far sooner than expected.

Ah, I’m just a dreamer but these dreams have a cer­tain appeal …