Fascinating stuff. But ultimately unconvincing and contradictory nonetheless.
The piece starts out with an homage to the supposed progress in the development of “new products” in the financial services industry. That clearly didn’t work out so well, unless one thinks that our recent excursion to the brink of global economic collapse, through a combination of a glut of new financial products leveraged by ignorance and greed, is an indicator of advancement.
The cute story of the lake is interesting but unsound in this context. The ecosystem of the lake is fed from an external ecosystem. As long as the external ecosystem can supply resources to the lake, then growth of lily pads will continue, until a natural limit in the lake is reached. But what if, as in the likely case of the planet earth, there is no readily-available external ecosystem to supply additional resources?
On current trends the growth rate of our technology in some areas (computing, for example) is impressive, but not at all matched by the growth rates in the technology needed to provide sustainable energy and materials sources for the technologies themselves, and for the growing numbers of humanity, increasingly demanding these technologies (and who, incidentally, will soon be able to live as long as they want, if not forever). The opposite is the case, when one considers the declining energy return on energy invested (EROEI) to produce a unit of energy from available energy sources (fossil or renewable). Renewable sources will of course become more viable as technology develops, so the EROEI for renewables will undoubtedly improve, but when everything else is growing vertically, the energy supply will have to grow at pretty much the same rate as well, energy/economic decoupling notwithstanding. So the “vertical” growth in technology will be supported by what, exactly?
And as far as what will remain unequivocally human, the proposal that “ours [will be] the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations” is clearly contradictory, if the author’s predictions turn out to be true. In such a case, the species that supersedes humanity will obviously (and inherently, by the arguments advanced by the author) seek to extend *its* physical and mental reach beyond whatever the current limitations are at any given time.
In a very real sense, technological progress (in the past century at least) has always exceeded growth in the the human dimension. Remember, every human is hard-wired within a fairly limited range of parameters, but there are no such limits on technology, per se. So yes, this will continue. How far it gets is another matter. Until technology comes up with ‘virtual energy’ to match its virtual reality, and until the laws of nature are adjusted to rule out chance and chaos, I would suspect that instead of a shining singularity, we (whatever ‘we’ means at that time) will find ourselves muddling through a state of affairs similar to the one we’re in now, which is partly the outcome of our progress in developing exciting new products in the financial services industry.
