We are currently in the year 5225 AW. Five thousand two hundred and twenty-five years After Writing—since humanity first began pressing styluses into clay and giving thought a permanent shape. 5,225 years since human recorded history began.
To live in the year 5225 AW is to be a descendant of that first act. We are part of a chain of over five thousand years long—an unbroken line of written thought stretching from the clay tablets of Sumer to the glowing screen you hold in your hand.
I’m sure our stone age ancestors living in prehistoric times never thought of themselves as living in a BW “before” era. Similarly, we may be living in about the year 20 BS (Before the Singularity).
To future minds, we may appear as the last primitives—the Before People, flickering at the edge of self-awareness. Or perhaps we’ll be remembered as the larval stage of something else entirely—something vast and incomprehensible.
In the strange new world emerging, the defining struggle may no longer be for survival, but for purpose.
When robots inevitably come to look and speak like humans—assuming we don’t obliterate ourselves first—a significant number of people will likely choose relationships with their “ideal” manufactured partners. If memory can be altered, some may even opt to forget their partner is a machine. And if conception and pregnancy are outsourced, the formation of families needn’t be affected at all. It would certainly be an experiment in human happiness—but I doubt it would be a success. It would be like living on fast food, cake, and ice cream every day: pleasurable at first, but ultimately unsatisfying, and liable to make you sick.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Very true, Pascal. Most of my “problems” have been caused by my mind not being able to sit quietly.
I think the most rational position on God is agnosticism not atheism. But I have a deep instinct to believe, and so I do, most of the time.
I think some people see the push to colonise Mars as like building lifeboats while the ship is under attack from pirates, fire has broken out on the bridge, the helmsman has had a heart attack, the captain is drunk in the hold, and the vessel is accelerating towards the icebergs.