Happiness for everyone and for nothing
Google-immortality and imitation of the future
Viktor Marakhovsky, RT
It seems that humanity can already do everything: launch a probe to alpha Centauri, do without gasoline on highways and diagnose one drop of blood. In any case, however, it can be useful to dive into the nuances. Publicist Viktor Marakhovsky – about the ghosts of the technological revolution.
Dear readers!
The other day, the head of one of Google's research divisions, Raymond Kurzweil, made a sensational statement that people will "achieve practical immortality" within the next decade.
To better assess the meaning of this sensation, one nuance should be taken into account. The inventor and futurist Kurzweil has been making similar statements constantly and for a long time. The timing of the onset of immortality is walking a little – from "by 2045" to "a few years later".
He reported this in 1999.
He reported this in 2010.
Since 2012 – after Kurzweil was accepted to Google – he reports this annually as a clock.
Kurzweil does not mention any sensational technical breakthroughs justifying his predictions. Only a general principle is voiced from year to year: the development of biotechnologies and nanorobots circulating through the organisms of citizens, which will allow to delay aging in a timely manner, and then bioengineering /cyborgization, and by the middle of the XXI century a person will be able not only to live forever, but also to "change the bodily appearance".
So far, the only real achievement in this direction is the annual mention of Google by tens of thousands of publications and web resources - in connection with a very, very soon breakthrough that will change our lives. This certainly helps the inflow of investments and supports the company's share price. But there is no reason to consider Google forecasts as promises for today.
...And here are a couple of other news of recent weeks.
The first news: the official US medical regulator proposes punishment for "Steve Jobs in a skirt" Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos (estimated at $9 billion as of 2015). Holmes, who announced a breakthrough technology and became the youngest female billionaire thanks to sensational blood test technology, will be deprived of the right to "own or operate any laboratory related to blood analysis" for two years.
The reason is "the inability of Theranos management to eliminate the numerous violations found." The sensational technology of blood analysis (laboratory-on-a-chip, which allows 240 tests to be carried out by one drop of blood from a finger) turned out to be inoperative. The only analysis that, based on the results of a decade of work, the Holmes startup was successful is an analysis for herpes. Theranos, as it turned out, conducted the other 240 analyses on traditional equipment manufactured by traditional companies.
The second news: from the official website of the startup of billionaire Elon Musk (he can probably be called "Steve Jobs in trousers"), all references to the home super megabatare Powerwall have quietly disappeared. To make it clear what we are talking about, just dive into time and read the following sensation:
"On May 1, 2015, Musk, the head of Tesla, specializing in the production of electric vehicles, held a presentation at which he presented a new development – a battery that can supply energy to private homes and commercial enterprises.
The supply of batteries in the United States is scheduled to begin in the summer of 2015. Musk noted in his speech that the production of new batteries of this type "will change the entire structure of the global energy industry."
What is worth noting here, dear readers. Last year, Tesla showed network losses of about $800 million. As it is easy to understand, another startup of "Steve Jobs in trousers" – rockets with beautifully self–rotating reusable first stages - is also still in a deep minus. Besides, they fall down much more often than they sit down. And the reusability – for which, in theory, all the pictorial "landing steps on a platform in the ocean" are made – has not yet been demonstrated once.
What I'm all about: there is reason to suspect that in recent years we have been dealing with a wave of imitation, or PR progress. That is, in parallel with real scientific and technological progress, billionaire companies are living and thriving, successfully producing breakthroughs in the media space that are identical to natural ones.
We saw something similar about 20 years ago in the era of the so–called "dot-com" - when an incredible bubble of startups, mainly American, swelled on the world market. They, I remember, announced the advent of a "new economy in which the main profits will be extracted for intangible services from the Internet."
That bubble burst with a wild bang at the turn of the millennium, and today its only relic remains spam from the series "earn up to a thousand bucks a day without leaving home."
As it is easy to see, today "breakthroughs that are about to change our lives" are concentrated elsewhere. These are all kinds of savings – energy (as in the case of megabataries), resources (alternative energy and electric vehicles), costs in general (reusable rockets) and even blood (see "Jobs in a skirt").
And so that the vague prospects are quite dizzying – on top of this, sensational forecasts are regularly made about the imminent immortality, space tourism for several thousand dollars and "the death of hydrocarbons in 15 years."
I have a version. All this "economic bubble" reflects one completely objective fact, namely: the economic effect of the average inhabitant of the Earth is continuously falling. This causes a constant reduction of what is considered to be a "labor resource" in advanced countries.
Source: US Department of Labor
The reasons are obvious: production is being automated, accounting, management, and control are being automated. Citizens who until recently performed the necessary, but "uncreative" work are gradually being displaced by programs and mechanisms.
As a result, the question of how to reduce, roughly speaking, the real costs of maintaining the population, while not dropping demand, economic volumes, etc., is becoming more acute.
The logical answer is to virtualize the cost of living if possible. That is, to make sure that the average citizen of a developed country, who in rough reality has a fairly cheap housing, a penny smartphone in production, riding a plastic car for a couple of thousand dollars and eating penny products, is sure that he has something expensive, advanced and valuable. And I would pay for all these overrated goods and services the money received for the overrated work of a waiter, a dog wash, a trade consultant.
It is important to remember that there is no real breakthrough into the future – that is, the development of new sources that allow you to get an unlimited amount of energy for a penny – yet (and it is to this maxim – "a lot of energy for free for everyone" – that all the dreamy world fiction is reduced, from the Andromeda Nebula to Back to the Future).
In this sense, the constantly growing figures for the use of solar or wind energy are only a consequence of filling niches that were discovered and calculated decades ago (and they began to be filled in connection with the rise in the cost of production of "traditional" hydrocarbons). Therefore, in fact, a popular example of a revolution in wind energy is now island Denmark, sitting on an "air tube" between the Baltic and the Atlantic, and tropical countries are an example of solar energy. As for hydropower, for example, due to the limited number of rivers in most countries, growth in this area has already stopped. For example, if in the 1920s in the USA 40% of the electricity consumed was provided by hydroelectric power plants, now their share is less than 7%. There is an increase in consumption, but there are no new rivers.
As a result, in the absence of a real future, the imitation future is becoming more and more active. It boils down, in fact, only to the increasing virtualization of everything that people consume and possess.
And in this simulated future, in a certain (financial) sense, there is no difference whether a certain supertechnology actually exists or not. The main thing is that it should be consumed, so that there is demand, so that the shares grow and "costs for further research" are included in the cost, and there was an IPO, and so on.
Therefore, we constantly hear about dizzying technological breakthroughs in advanced countries – breakthroughs that are about to change our lives.
...The main question here is how it will all end.
Will the imitators of the future be able to make it to the present leap into the future, when not "energy savings" will sharply increase, but its availability itself.
Or – will they be able to endlessly simulate a continuous revolution in the absence of a real one.
...Or one day the "bubble of the future" will burst just like all the previous ones.
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27.04.2016