Evolved consciousness

Imagine an intelligent species a million years more advanced than we Homo sapiens are right now. Multiply every year since H. sapiens became an industrial species by 4,000. How many more industrial revolutions could occur in that time? How many generations would be born, discover new things and die over the course of one million years, passing on their intelligence and wisdom to the future?

On the cosmic scale, a million years is like nine-and-half minutes out of a 24-hours day. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago; the Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago; fossil records of the earliest life on Earth go back around 3.5 billion years ago. 

Yet for us humans, a million years is ten times longer than the time it took us to reach this point where we are now from the beginnings of behavioural modernity - when we began to show first signs of abstract thought, developing art, music and dance, and the use of blades to kill and butcher animals.

Imagine us a million years from now. Give it a try. Imagine that the human species has managed to pass through the Great Filter. We've not blown ourselves up with nukes, we've not boiled our planet dry, we've not killed ourselves of with an out-of-control biological or physical experiment. Or been smacked into extinction by an asteroid.

What would we be like?

What would any intelligent species one million years more advanced than us be like? Mere survival is not enough. The shark has been around for 320 million years and remains an unsophisticated aquatic apex predator, little changed over a third of a billion years - because it was so successful at what it was doing, it didn't have to. So a jumping-off point is needed - the use of sophisticated tools, the harnessing of fire. Fire led to cooking; cooked meats require less chewing; weaker jaw muscles circling the cranium enabled to the skull to grow; bigger cranial capacity - more intelligence. A virtuous circle. How will that virtuous circle spiral upward to further virtue in future evolution? 

My intuition says that we would be more angelic, less barbaric, less prone to anger, less lazy, vastly more intelligent, better able to cooperate (without cooperation we'd not be as technologically advanced as we are). Starting with anger. Reactive violence is far more prevalent among our nearest living relatives, the chimpanzee and bonobo. H. sapiens is less ready to lash out at the drop of a hat; instead of reactive violence, we have developed proactive violence - institutional, cold, premeditated, organised. 

I would like to see the propensity to anger squeezed out of the human psyche. We do need to be able, however, to deal with human evil in a firm, resolute way. We have part of the answer - the Prisoner's Dilemma, which teaches us to get along with everyone until the moment someone does the dirty on you - and then you hit them, and keep hitting them until they return to the path of cooperation. This worked on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945. The difficulty is in defining a) what constitutes a transgression and b) what the correct and proportional response should be. This is, however, a detail - though an important one. The crucial thing is that the moral arc of future human evolution continues to progress away from evil and towards good. We no longer bait bears or throw cats into fires for our amusement.

So far, I have been writing about the physical and mental development of humans as a species. But I really want to dwell on the future evolution of paranormal abilities.

Sceptics would argue that there are no such things as paranormal abilities. Proponents of the paranormal would say that they are - but can offer no real conclusive proof. Psychic researchers try to find these supernatural powers through experiments; many of us believe that there is something there. An intuitive feeling that mind over matter is real. An untestable hypothesis? My father's rhetorical question posed late in life - "why have I been so lucky" - is the clue - consciously wanting to be lucky is the answer. Not thinking "I want to be lucky" - but having an awareness of that desire.

I am assuming that mind over matter is real. A weak force, too weak to be recognised by the scientific method. But there, nonetheless. Could these evolve into something more powerful over thousands of generations? Genuine paranormal abilities manifesting themselves in greatly more intelligent, wiser, and longer-living beings - our future selves? 

We are developing the Internet of Things. Below is a smart price-tag powered by light. Not necessarily solar power - indoor light will do, thanks to the small perovskite cell, manufactured by Saule Technologies of Wrocław. A PKN Orlen petrol station in Piastów - is about to go live with a trial. Every item's price and stock code is stored in the cloud, and with a single keystroke, an operator can change the price on every shelf in every shop across a chain. And because these tags are powered by a renewable energy source, you don't have to change batteries every 18 months. Naturally, demand outstrips supply at this moment, but this (Polish invention) is the future of retail.

"You have the Internet of Things?" asks the Evolved Being. "We already have the Telepathy of Things."

Imagine being able to think price changes across the network instead of entering them via a keyboard connected to a computer linked to the cloud. "Prices? How second-millennium! We mutually intuit the subjective utility value of a product; the transaction occurs mentally." Imagine guiding machines by thought. But we don't have the physics! Give us a few more centuries, our physics will get there. The Ghost in the Machine. Mind-machine interface - wireless. Conscious management of objects.

I am slowly discovering the powers of my consciousness. Belatedly, but even so. They are weak, but they will grow in power from incarnation to incarnation. Biological and spiritual evolution happening together. 

This time two years ago:
Goodnight Belarus - may God keep you

This time seven years ago:
Motorbike across Poland to buy fine Polish wine

This time eight years ago:
Eat Polish apples, drink Polish cider

This time nine years ago:
Hottest week ever (37C likely to be beaten this week)

This time ten years ago:
Progress along the second line of the Warsaw Metro (now a normal part of city life)

This time 11 years ago:
Doric arches, ul. Targowa

This time 12 years ago:
A place in the country, everyone's ideal

This time 15 years ago:
I must go down to the sea again

A better tomorrow - science and technology

I have on my bookshelves comics from the 1950s and '60s in which from time to time, there'd be fascinating articles about the future. How, for example, by the year 1985, it will be possible to fly from London to Sydney in two hours thanks to nuclear-powered space tugs. We would all be flying to work in personal heli-jets.

Futures are all too often predicted on the basis on the present; if over the past three decades leading up to 1957 have witnessed amazing progress in aerospace technology (from biplanes to space rockets), surely that tendency can only be upward? Few paused to ask whether we need to be in the office (Arthur C. Clarke famously did, in 1964, quite accurately predicting remote work by 2014. ). 

The history of human technological progress is full of cases where an individual or handful of individuals could bring about a departure from the established arc of development. One sudden discovery or invention dramatically changes human progress. Some you can see coming, others you can't until they've happened. Who could have predicted the impact the smartphone would have on our daily lives when Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007?

Black-swan events - entirely unpredicted, with a high impact - are also lurking in our predestined future. One I've been considering for a while has been disclosure by governments that our planet is being visited by advanced non-human intelligence, ushering in new paradigms in physics, cosmology and spirituality.

Healthcare

Let's look at healthcare; the technology that's just around the corner is gene therapy; having unravelled the human genome, the ability to fix faulty genes will make the treatment of rare genetic conditions easier, but it will also give a more targeted response to common ones such as cancer. The need for proper clinical trials, which can last upwards of eight years, is the main reason why advances in medical science are not swiftly turned into commonplace medical interventions. Fixing what's gone wrong is the main goal of medicine - one that will become far more important in future will be fixing what's natural - the ageing process. Genetic technology extending the human lifespan will, I believe, be well advanced by 2050. A bit more science-fiction would be a pill or process that can raise IQ. The benefit for humanity to raise the IQ of the lowest quintile by ten points would be massive.

The built environment

The construction industry has been slow to adopt new technology. I see three major developments - the first being digitalisation of the whole process, from design to use, based on building information modelling (BIM) or at least an easy-and-cheap-to-use version of it, perhaps augmented by artificial intelligence. Developer, architect, contractor and end-user should all have access (via the cloud) to all relevant files pertaining to a given building including 3D models, energy-use forecasts, instructions, guarantees and maintenance schedules. The second is modular construction, with prefabricated units being mass-produced in factories and delivered to site for assembly. The third is carbon-neutral construction. The CO₂ emissions the come from making concrete is critical; if we can manage to turn methane into four atoms of pure hydrogen and one atom of pure carbon (as graphene) and mix the graphene (in tiny amounts) with cement, the resulting concrete becomes much stronger and therefore not as much as needed for the same structure. The 5bn tonnes of cement produced each year thus account for some 8% of the world’s anthropogenic CO₂. Yet if less than 0.1% by weight of graphene is added to the mixture, concrete ends up 30% stronger. And stronger concrete means less of it is needed, with a consequent reduction in CO₂.

Energy

Fossil fuels are on the way out, natural gas being the last to be extinguished. Renewables will - in time - take over completely. Hydrogen may yet take over, but there's a long way to go; nuclear fusion is always 30 years away. In the meanwhile, I have high hopes in perovskite - a translucent crystal with photovoltaic properties. A Polish company, Saule Technologies, has developed the technology to inkjet print perovskite onto thin plastic film, which can then be applied to any surface turning it into a solar panel. Imagine sticking this to existing buildings - the demand is potentially huge. Speaking to the firm yesterday, they say that there's already demand that would justify building 50 factories to make the stuff. Just one property developer has five million square metres of space onto which to put perovskite film - there's a need for square kilometres of perovskite film every year. Far lighter than silicon panels, perovskite film can be cut to shape, wrapped around objects, tinted different colours. Once the money gets behind it, perovskite will go mainstream very quickly.

IT

The cloud will advance, gobbling up petabytes of data as it goes, sucking in government services, personal data and corporate computing. It will become cheaper, more secure and more effective all the while. AI is set to work on the data and AGI (artificial general intelligence) will emerge into the mainstream. One threat to cloud security will be quantum computing, in particular its predicted ability to crack open any encryption. The battle for quantum supremacy (one of the last things my father wrote down before he died in October 2019) will shape up between the US and China; the outcome could be geopolitically decisive. Will we get from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness? This to me is an existentially crucial question. Either consciousness is merely something that emerges from complexity, and once there's enough computing power to get close to the number of neuronal connections in the human brain, computers will become sentient. Or - consciousness is a property of living things - computers are not living things, so no matter how powerful, they will never achieve true sentience. 

Computers will, I believe, increasingly interact with human biology. Goggles will be coming soon; once we accept how they will change the way we look, our workspace will no longer be the keyboard and screen, but a virtual keyboard and virtual screen, mapped out with our gestures. The concept of 'transhumanism' - using technology to augment human performance - is nothing new. The invention of the shoe, for example, several millennia ago, allowed Homo sapiens to move faster over rougher terrain in pursuit of prey. Glasses came into common use in 14th century Italy. If you wear shoes and glasses, you are already 'transhuman' in the strict sense. Elon Musk's Neuralink Corporation is developing a brain-computer interface. Yet we are already interfacing with data; our smartphones augment our memory (who remembers phone numbers any more?), and instant access to Wikipedia settles many a pub argument over, for instance, how many machineguns a Hawker Hurricane Mk IIb had. Whether we end up having computer memory plugged into our brain remains to be seen!

Human geodiversity - more predictions here.

This time six years ago:
Memory, place and experience

This time seven years ago:
UK Number One in world Soft Power rankings

This time ten years ago:
First flight from Modlin

This time 11 years ago:
Another cycle route to work

This time 14 years ago:
PZL M-28 and Piaggio Avanti - Okęcie regulars

A better tomorrow - human and economic geodiversity

I was lucky as a child to have travelled several time to the continent in the 1960s, holidays in Poland and France - with glimpses of life in Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia along the way. The differences were vast, even for a child, to see and feel and experience.

Just 22 miles across the Channel, France was entirely different to England; the smells (cigarette smoke from Galoises and mais Gitanes; the coffee-and-newsprint aroma of the café-tabac, wine cellars, fresh peaches, rotting fish in Boulogne and rural sewerage); the cars, (Citroëns, Panhards, Peugeots and Renaults driving on the other side of the road), the architecture of course - the typefaces even. Poland was even more exotic - though central Warsaw was relatively affluent, rural Poland was glaringly poor. Czechoslovakia was from another planet - huge red stars on the front of trams and trains, grim industrial town bereft of colour (Warsaw had bright neons), wet cobblestones and black Tatra cars scuttling about like gigantic trilobites. The things you could buy in shops in one country were completely different to those available in another - toys, for example. Warsaw's Centralna Składnica Harcerska was full of toys from across the Soviet bloc (mostly East German or Polish, as I recall); French shops stocked Norev toy cars, British shops had Corgis and Airfix.

Today, you can stroll through any European shopping mall (as I did through Galeria Mokotów) and without looking at the signage, it's hard to tell what country you're in, let alone what city. There's an Adidas, a Carrefour, a Chanel, an H&M, a Reserved, a Zara. The layouts are identical, driven by footfall algorithms. This homogeneity has been caused by globalisation and European integration, but I suspect that the future will see a reversal of this trend outside of our biggest cities, where corporations will hang on. Local character, local colour, local history and traditions and authenticity will be on a returning tide. The idea of going shopping in, say, Bydgoszcz and finding different shops selling different products to those sold in Białystok is appealing. A return to diversity - but within a borderless economic bloc. Will the same happen in the US - a nation of identical strip-malls coast to coast?

Here are my forecasts for how 2050 might well look across three sectors. Barring nuclear war or another deadly pandemic, or any other black-swan event. 

Food:
Locally grown, regionally traded. Artisan cheeses from French and Italian regions have long shown the way. Unique local tastes enjoyed across the continent. New specialities will emerge as a new generation of entrepreneur experiments with ingredients and techniques, seeking genuine innovation in taste. As meat becomes a luxury to be enjoyed sparingly, the gap it leaves behind will be filled by products as yet unknown - but far more likely to come from a local gastro start-up than from a corporation.

Produce will be as organic as possible, though with the knowledge that some pesticides are needed now and then. Human urine will make a comeback as a commonly-used fertiliser (lant - fermented urine, diluted one part to five with water). Brewing will return to being a local activity, with far less space for international brands that need transporting over long distances and mega advertising budgets. Same for mineral waters! New cultivars of fruit and veg will appear, products of human manipulation; old, forgotten ones will return. People from 2050 will look back at our time and wonder how we managed with so few varietals of the produce we ate. Regional distinctions, based on soil and climate, will be exacerbated.

Clothing:
Haute couture and fast fashion will be marginalised. Clothes will be designed to be durable and practical. Again, regional differences will begin to re-establish themselves. Old fabric, worn, but loved, shall be repurposed, authenticity and local provenance will win out over brands and labels. Clothes shall be washed less regularly - to save electricity, water and wear and tear on the fabric. Greys and browns, natural hues, will dominate - loud colours will be shunned as being 'old fashioned'. Craft skills will command premium prices, attracting more young people to acquire mastery in them. And tailors will mend and alter clothes, keeping them going longer. We shall still strive to have our own 'look' - but this will be less homogenous than it is today. 

Transport:
People will travel less, and walk more. Flying, in particular, will be seen as a shameful activity. Rail travel will become dominant mode of travel for inter-regional and shorter international trips, with massive investments in the infrastructure. Light rain and trams will make a comeback. Bicycles, electric bikes and scooters, will be the norm in cities, milder winters will help with this. There will be a strong classic car movement, dedicated to preserving surviving cars from history - but few amateurs will be interested in vehicles from the 2020s.

More predictions soon (healthcare, construction, energy, IT)!

This time last year:
Warka - small-town Poland's moving up

This time two years ago:

Summer działka joys

This time three years ago:

Local round-up

This time four years ago:
New Nikons on the way!

This time 10 years ago:
Work continues on S2, going under the railway lines

This time 11 years ago:
Stand Easy! - a short story

This time 14 years ago:
God Save The Queen - I mean it, Ma'am

This time 15 years ago:
Legoland, just outside Warsaw's borders

A better tomorrow - the lie of the land

Here are my predictions as to the medium-term future of (European at least) society in terms of economic geography. My base year is 2050, so only 28 years away - as distant to us today as 1994.

So - here we are, it's 2050. Our cities are hollowing out; populations are finding new a space in which to live - the near countryside. I'd define this as being still within comfortable reach of the city, a ring beyond today's exurbs - the ring's shape defined by rail networks radiating from each city. The more lines out of a given city, the broader the area that will experience this effect.

Covid-19 has served to accelerate the move towards remote work, working from home, and e-commerce with home delivery, parcel lockers and fulfilment centres also ironing out differences between the city and the sticks.

The remote countryside will have its enthusiasts, but this will be a hardy minority that chooses a more challenging life, three or more hours away from the nearest major city and its amenities.

An hour, an hour-and-half's journey time door to door by train into the city centre is sufficiently far away, and yet remains comfortably close for occasional visits rather than daily commuting. 

The city itself will endure - of course it will - but its role will be more focused. Conurbations of 500,000+ will act as governmental and corporate hubs, centres for regional and national authorities and big-business HQ and shared-service centres. Their reason for surviving is above all their role as a creative hub, where people get together to share ideas and generate new thinking. Universities, theatres and concert halls need a critical mass which doesn't exist in smaller communities. Administration itself can be distributed geographically. The experience of working from home suggests that routine tasks (at least the ones which won't disappear because of advancing technology) can be handled from anywhere. Creativity, however, burgeons when people meet in groups.

Business will change. The notion of sustainability will have sustained. While climate change remains humanity's biggest problem, sustainability will not have been eclipsed by more faddish notions. Investors' horizons will stretch further in time. Many large corporations that we know today will have disappeared, many others will have survived - mainly those that focus on the long term rather than on quarterly results. Shareholder pressure for profits and dividends will ease, again; short-term greed will be less powerful as a driver of corporate performance. A new generation will be content to live in comfort rather than striving for luxury, mindful of the environmental cost of a possessions-based lifestyle.

The presence of medium-sized businesses - strong in their local regions - will become more visible. They will take the place of corporations that no longer have a purpose.

 There are things that local enterprises can provide - food and shelter (agriculture and construction are suited to small teams), furniture, clothing. Craft skills will become popular - courses in carpentry, bricklaying, knitting. Making things, mastering tools and techniques. And not just making things - repairing things. The circular economy will have gained a foothold; the first generation to be materially worse off in absolute terms than its parents' generation will be far better off spiritually and mentally, having turned its back on conspicuous consumption and the economics of built-in obsolescence.

Imagine cars, refrigerators, laptops, being designed with a use-life of 100 years; modular construction with parts which wear out can easily replaceable or upgradable. Given that there are still many aircraft in active service with air forces around the world that are 50 or even 60 years old - this is possible from an engineering perspective. I believe that consumers will want to buy products with extremely long life-cycles, even if the purchase price is higher, total cost of ownership will be lower - with less damage to the environment.

There will remain many things that only the largest multinational corporations can provide - semiconductors, gene therapy or arrays of photovoltaic panels for example. Wherever economies of scale kick in, this is where the corporation will remain strong. Advanced manufacturing needs access to huge amounts of capital to develop new technologies. But whilst hardware will remain the preserve of larger firms, software can be written by small teams from anywhere. Corporations processing food - Kraft or Unilever, for example, or brewing, such as AB InBev - will find it harder to compete with nimbler local firms trading on regional traditions and authenticity.

We'll still need our storytellers and entertainers too - not bland, global megastars filling stadiums for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop, but authentic local acts, relevant to their communities. People will want to go out - expect an upsurge in small restaurants, cafes and bars in small towns that today have few or none.

Tomorrow I'll look at a return to the diversity of human geography that I predict will happen - an antidote to the homogeneity of Europe or North America.

[See also How does a 'better tomorrow' look?]

This time last year:
New phone, new laptop

This time two years ago:
Longevity and Purpose

This time four years ago:
New bus stop for Karczunkowska

This time 10 years ago:
Who should pay for railways?
[How America built an electric railway line over the Rockies - over 100 years ago!]

This time 12 years ago:
Grunwald - the big picture

This time 14 years ago:
"Take me right back to the track, Jack"

This time 15 years ago:
The summer sublime

How does a 'better tomorrow' look?

If we assume that this planet has another two and half billion or so years before the sun swallows it and at least another billion during which it will be habitable here, there's still a hell of a lot of future ahead of us! 

But how will that future look - better than the past, worse - or the same (after all we're only human)?

Homo sapiens has only been around for around 300,000 years - not even one three-thousandth of the time still left for this planet. Literature - the written form of storytelling - has only been developing for 4,000 years. The Industrial Revolution began some 250 years ago. How much further can we evolve as a species during that billion years we have left, before we're forced to move on? Or will we kill ourselves with nuclear weapons or runaway man-made climate change within the next few hundred years?

I'm an optimist; I believe that despite setbacks, man-made or natural, we will prevail, we will evolve, we will eventually reach out beyond our planet, our solar system, and go on to colonise space.

Intelligence, wisdom and kindness will win out over barbarism and stupidity. The long march of the evolution of consciousness is destined to continue as the Universe unfolds.

This may seem unlikely right now, considering the current outbreak of barbarism and stupidity in the Kremlin, but progress is generally two steps forward one step back.

Born in England the 1950s, the biggest part of my life has generally been the experience of an upward arc of human progress - material, technological and social. From the grey postwar years into the Swinging Sixties, the colourful consumerist 1970s; the 1980s London of Mrs Thatcher's Big Bang, the end of communism, the single European market, computers and smartphones, life had been getting steadily better, more interesting, diverse and richer in experiences and horizons, especially intellectual ones. Sadly, I believe that this particular upward arc peaked sometime around 2012-2013. History is cyclical. Since then, it has turned downwards; this is clear as we review events of the past decade, beginning with the aftermath of the financial crisis (that somehow bypassed Poland), Brexit, Trump, Xi, Putin and Covid - and now Putin unrestrained - and of course climate change. Dangerous populist ideologies, stupid people tampering with national policies

How will the future look? Will tomorrow be better? 

Not even our best minds are able to predict the future with any meaningful accuracy. Some of us can intuit the future better than others, but even so, this typically means getting one thing right for every two things we get wrong.

We couldn't even model the course of a pandemic. We can't see how Russia's invasion of Ukraine will end. (Hopefully with the departure of every last Russian military unit from Ukrainian soil.) But then what? Regime change in Russia? Reparations? Who will pay for the rebuilding of a shattered nation? How will Russia look after such a debacle? Right now, we haven't a clue.

But let's think about a deeper future. 2072. Fifty years on.

I'm optimistic. History is cyclical. [Another link] After the downturn, an upturn. We will progress, we will have learnt. Overcoming the challenge of man-made climate change and man-made disasters such as despotism, repression and war must be top of the human agenda.

I think the future will tend towards being less consumerist-oriented. There will be less 'stuff' in circulation. [Look at your mobile phone. It's a phone, a TV, a radio, a camera, a movie camera, a watch, a compass, a step-counter, a torch - individual bits of kit that are no longer needed.] Books will become a status symbol as consumption of reading material will happen more online; artificial intelligence will be bolstered by our own augmented intelligence. Example - access via one's mobile device to Wikipedia. A slightly simpler voice-activated interface will make it easier still.

The future will be greyer - but it will be more meaningful. Less gaily coloured plastic baubles. The look-and-feel of our future world will be more austere; showing off will be seen as infantile and egotistic. Conspicuous consumption, built-in obsolescence and 'keeping up with the Jones' are already a consigned to history, having peaked in the 1970s and '80s.

The rush to make money will be tempered by a greater respect for the fragile planet on which we live. Fewer privately owned cars, less exotic holidays. But a rush to live in temperate climes, to move away from unbearably hot zones. 

My hope is that people will learn to live in comfort and no longer chase after luxury, placing greater store on learning, skills, arts and crafts, science, philosophy and extraterrestrial exploration. The life sciences will flourish; who could have believed that a vaccine could have been rolled out globally within a year of a pandemic taking hold across humanity? The next decades will see advances in medical technology moving forward at a pace similar to than in IT since the 1980s. We'll see huge advances in longevity as we start to unravel the genetic mechanisms of ageing.

I'd like to think that in the longer term future, the levels of knowledge, wisdom and insight that I have achieved in my mid-60s will be standard across most 20 year-olds, who will only stand to grow wiser and more knowledgeable as their reach their 200s.

A stable population of five billion human beings, with natural population decline kicking in by the second half of this century will be sustainable.

Five billion people, at peace with themselves, at peace with each other, not obsessed with wealth and status but with acquiring knowledge and spiritual development.

This time last year:
Blossom time in Jakubowizna

This time two years ago:

Apple-blossom time in Jakubowizna

This time three years ago:
Busy doing nothin'

This time eight years ago:
Springtime pictorial

This time nine years ago:
Kitten time!

This time ten years ago:
Warsaw-Centrum to Jeziorki by train with super-wide lens

This time 11 years ago:
Loose Lips Sink Ships - part II

This time 12 years ago:
Jeziorki in the infra red 

This time 13 years ago:
Some rain, at last!