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Requiem For Humanity
This book is a short collection of essays that attempt a balanced view of various topics that will influence our next century. The future of humanity is seen by many to be on the cusp of change. Those who predict the future see tomorrow through lens formed from their education, experience and viewpoints. Bill Joy presages an apocalypse; Ray Kurzweil expects to ride a technologic stairway to heaven; and Jaron Lanier predicts humanity will transcend itself into an unforeseeable future. This book sees the future through the lens of a generalist. I apply critical thinking and realistic application of diverse science into my prophecy for humanity over this century. My hope is to give the general reader a rational context for viewing the changes transforming our world today. It is better to know where the tiger we are riding is headed—if we hope to hold on and maybe even steer.
70 pages, Paperback
First published May 12, 2011
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August 10, 2019
“We are on a steep slope sliding toward extinction.” (p. 60)
Alan Hoshor has done a good job of summarizing and critiquing some current ideas from a wide range of futurists and others currently interested in the human predicament and how it might be resolved. He doesn’t provide a bibliography but some of the works mentioned in the text were written by Ray Kurzweil, Jared Diamond, Bill Joy, Jaron Lanier, Joel Garreau, Francis Fukuyama, George Friedman, Ian Morris, Jeff Hawkins, Nicholas Wade, etc. I’ve read most of these authors and others and can say that Hoshor’s stark conclusion that we will be going the way of the dodo in the not too distant future seems entirely justified.
(Some other very interesting futurists that Hoshor doesn’t name include, Pierre Baldi who wrote The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001); Howard Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000); John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (2009); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (2005); Dennis Littrell, The World Is Not as We Think It is (2011); Ramez Naam, More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (2005); and Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002).)
Hoshor’s book is a collection of sixteen short essays on subjects related to where we are today and where we are going. Some of the titles are “Predestination,” “Human Instincts,” “Disease,” “Biological Weapons,” “Ecology,” “Artificial Intelligence,” “Interplanetary Space,” ”Religion,” etc.
One of Hoshor’s ideas is that there will be Technological Augmented Bioengineered (TAB) humans who will come before “the androids and biobots” of the next century. (Actually Hoshor writes on page 38, “toward the end of the decade,” but it’s obvious he means much later.) At any rate the idea that bioengineered humans augmented with technological elements is de rigueur among today’s futurists. Whether we will get to the full splendor of androids and biobots before the “requiem” is problematic to say the least. Hoshor understands this and the related question of just when do we enhanced and augmented humans cease to be human, and how will the unenhanced and unaugmented feel about their situation? Will they become pets of the rich and powerful or live in (as is suggested) human zoos?
With much of what humans know going into the Internet “cloud” to be downloaded by all, what Hoshor sees is the “emerging hive mind.” I think that this is one way that we might culturally evolve, like ants or bees, into a totalitarian society where everyone has his or her place and everyone behaves according to the dictates of the hive. This Brave New World sort of future is perhaps unattractive but one we may not be able to avoid.
Another of Hoshor’s ideas is that as we merge with the artifacts of our culture there will arise not slave-like members of a totalitarian society but multiple human species variously augmented and enhanced who may engage in internecine warfare (although not necessarily of the military kind) resulting in a prologue for the requiem (if you will).
Here are three more of Hoshor’s fine observations:
“Existing social mores, religions, and political groups create fundamental limits to what kinds of near term change is possible.” (p. 6)
“Mass movements arise not among the impoverished, but instead among relatively well-off middle classes facing loss of what they view as their entitlements.” (p. 22)
“We have consumed the easily developed resources across most of our world. We are now faced with more people consuming fewer resources at a higher relative cost.” (p. 23)
One of the most important conclusions derived from all the futurists that I have read including Hoshor is that humanity as we know it is doomed. Whether we destroy ourselves through our blind and ignorant exploitation of the planet or whether we culturally evolve away from what is now recognized as human, we will as presently constituted disappear. It used to be said in progressive circles that humans are on the way to “becoming.” Becoming what? was and is the question; and, just as Hoshor notes, “No one; human or artificial intelligence can predict the outcome of our next century” (p. 58)no one can predict what we will become.
Hosher concludes with a summary which I think is the best essay in the book. In it he writes “The …TAB humans emerging from this twenty first century will be competing between themselves; as well as competing with newly emergent forms of non-biological life. An immortal mind derived from Homo sapiens will be a museum piece. It will not have the knowledge, mental capacity or speed of thought to even usefully communicate with the intelligences emerging from this century.” (p. 59)
While I think Hoshor shows a fine understanding of what’s happening to humans today (would that people like the politicos in Washington had a clue), and what is likely to happen tomorrow and the day after, I don’t think anyone can really do more than extrapolate from the present—although it is important to do that. No one in the Middle Ages could have predicted electricity and how essential to modern life it would become; no one in the 19th century could have predicted the atomic bomb; and few if anyone really realized in 1950 that the computer would lead to the World Wide Web and the huge transformation of society it has fostered.
In short, there will be surprises to come, some of them astonishing and even seemingly magical.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Alan Hoshor has done a good job of summarizing and critiquing some current ideas from a wide range of futurists and others currently interested in the human predicament and how it might be resolved. He doesn’t provide a bibliography but some of the works mentioned in the text were written by Ray Kurzweil, Jared Diamond, Bill Joy, Jaron Lanier, Joel Garreau, Francis Fukuyama, George Friedman, Ian Morris, Jeff Hawkins, Nicholas Wade, etc. I’ve read most of these authors and others and can say that Hoshor’s stark conclusion that we will be going the way of the dodo in the not too distant future seems entirely justified.
(Some other very interesting futurists that Hoshor doesn’t name include, Pierre Baldi who wrote The Shattered Self: The End of Natural Evolution (2001); Howard Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000); John Michael Greer, The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World (2009); James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (2005); Dennis Littrell, The World Is Not as We Think It is (2011); Ramez Naam, More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement (2005); and Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002).)
Hoshor’s book is a collection of sixteen short essays on subjects related to where we are today and where we are going. Some of the titles are “Predestination,” “Human Instincts,” “Disease,” “Biological Weapons,” “Ecology,” “Artificial Intelligence,” “Interplanetary Space,” ”Religion,” etc.
One of Hoshor’s ideas is that there will be Technological Augmented Bioengineered (TAB) humans who will come before “the androids and biobots” of the next century. (Actually Hoshor writes on page 38, “toward the end of the decade,” but it’s obvious he means much later.) At any rate the idea that bioengineered humans augmented with technological elements is de rigueur among today’s futurists. Whether we will get to the full splendor of androids and biobots before the “requiem” is problematic to say the least. Hoshor understands this and the related question of just when do we enhanced and augmented humans cease to be human, and how will the unenhanced and unaugmented feel about their situation? Will they become pets of the rich and powerful or live in (as is suggested) human zoos?
With much of what humans know going into the Internet “cloud” to be downloaded by all, what Hoshor sees is the “emerging hive mind.” I think that this is one way that we might culturally evolve, like ants or bees, into a totalitarian society where everyone has his or her place and everyone behaves according to the dictates of the hive. This Brave New World sort of future is perhaps unattractive but one we may not be able to avoid.
Another of Hoshor’s ideas is that as we merge with the artifacts of our culture there will arise not slave-like members of a totalitarian society but multiple human species variously augmented and enhanced who may engage in internecine warfare (although not necessarily of the military kind) resulting in a prologue for the requiem (if you will).
Here are three more of Hoshor’s fine observations:
“Existing social mores, religions, and political groups create fundamental limits to what kinds of near term change is possible.” (p. 6)
“Mass movements arise not among the impoverished, but instead among relatively well-off middle classes facing loss of what they view as their entitlements.” (p. 22)
“We have consumed the easily developed resources across most of our world. We are now faced with more people consuming fewer resources at a higher relative cost.” (p. 23)
One of the most important conclusions derived from all the futurists that I have read including Hoshor is that humanity as we know it is doomed. Whether we destroy ourselves through our blind and ignorant exploitation of the planet or whether we culturally evolve away from what is now recognized as human, we will as presently constituted disappear. It used to be said in progressive circles that humans are on the way to “becoming.” Becoming what? was and is the question; and, just as Hoshor notes, “No one; human or artificial intelligence can predict the outcome of our next century” (p. 58)no one can predict what we will become.
Hosher concludes with a summary which I think is the best essay in the book. In it he writes “The …TAB humans emerging from this twenty first century will be competing between themselves; as well as competing with newly emergent forms of non-biological life. An immortal mind derived from Homo sapiens will be a museum piece. It will not have the knowledge, mental capacity or speed of thought to even usefully communicate with the intelligences emerging from this century.” (p. 59)
While I think Hoshor shows a fine understanding of what’s happening to humans today (would that people like the politicos in Washington had a clue), and what is likely to happen tomorrow and the day after, I don’t think anyone can really do more than extrapolate from the present—although it is important to do that. No one in the Middle Ages could have predicted electricity and how essential to modern life it would become; no one in the 19th century could have predicted the atomic bomb; and few if anyone really realized in 1950 that the computer would lead to the World Wide Web and the huge transformation of society it has fostered.
In short, there will be surprises to come, some of them astonishing and even seemingly magical.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
December 29, 2016
A short book and quick read. As a "collection of essays," few seem to really stand on their own, but depend on the collective. On the other hand, the collection is loose-knit; while there is a sense of development, its not systematic, actually developing a thesis.
However, I was looking for an overview of how futurists see the next 50-100 years, and a general take on the viability of the human specie. It's grimmer than I thought; there are more forces than global warming lined up to clear us off the planet, some quite intentionally of our own devising. Many writers and their perspectives are invoked, partially critiqued, giving a pretty general consensus on our future. Or lack thereof.
However, I was looking for an overview of how futurists see the next 50-100 years, and a general take on the viability of the human specie. It's grimmer than I thought; there are more forces than global warming lined up to clear us off the planet, some quite intentionally of our own devising. Many writers and their perspectives are invoked, partially critiqued, giving a pretty general consensus on our future. Or lack thereof.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews