The Ultimate Reboot: Human Evolutis

You need to watch this video. Scary as it may be, this guy is absolutely right:

Even as mega-banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don’t look for it on your ballot — or in the stock exchange. It’ll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be … different.

Funny that I ran across this video a few minutes ago. This morning I was thinking to myself (as I like to do in the early morning when I should be out surfing but I’m taking care of Luca instead, while Marcia gets a few more hours of shut-eye) about how each generation learns. I read somewhere that each generation has to learn about 10x more information than the previous generation. It got me thinking about the internet and how it dominates our lives now and barely 10 years ago we hardly used it, 15 years ago most of us hadn’t even heard of the internet. And Luca’s generation will not only not know a world without it, here and now, we can’t even begin to theorize on what the internet will be in 15-20 years. My guess is that the current version of the internet is like tin cans on a string and that technology and biology will combine to bring the internet’s shared information and connectedness into our own bodies.

In plain language: we’ll get so tired of having to sit at a computer to use the internet, that we will eventually move the computer and the internet into our own bodies. If you’re melodramatic, you can conjure up The Borg or something. This will happen in out lifetime (under 40). And this will, optimistically, remove the alienating factors of the current version of the internet.

Enriquez’s point is that through biology and technology there will be a new species of human that will be part human part robot. Our generation (under 40) will see the beginnings and Luca’s generation will see it crystalize. This new species will overlap with Homo Sapiens for a brief time and then our species will be over. This new species, tentatively titled “Homo Evolutis” will be the first species that controls both its own evolution and the evolution of other species.

F*cking bananas!

The curmudgeons among us that think that this is all too much and would rather sit on an island somewhere missing all the fun (and I schizophrenically put myself in that camp) but for the new generations, they won’t be saddled with the baggage the previous generations carry. Use the cellphone as an example of this. Kids today love cellphones. My generation grudgingly uses them. As humans start to integrate technology into their bodies, they will begin to experience evolution at a machine’s pace (much faster than our own). It wil start with enhanced eye-balls and ears, and from there I can’t even begin to imagine.

[via JdotSmith]