This is part 2 of a collaboration with Dr. Garret Ryan of the ToldinStone youtube channel,
link to part 1 in the description below, one of my go to channels for history content,
history and archeology is after all my second love after science. As Garret detailed in
his video, the greco-Roman world saw futurism very differently than we do today. They saw
the future in terms of culture and politics. We, however, live in a very different world,
post industrial revolution, where our rapidly advancing technology outpaces any other period
in human history. In the modern age, we think of the future centered on the advancement
of technology. It is our reality, but in the past, not so much.
While the ancients saw the future as cyclic, and indeed 4th century Roman Emperors minted
coins proudly emblazoned with the legend Felicitas Temporum Reperatio, welcoming back the return
of happy times when that wasn’t entirely the case, and also coins depicting victory
when again that wasn’t always the case, today we tend to see predicting the future
colored largely by the last century of our development. Make no mistake, our rate of
technological advance over just a hundred years has no precedent in human history.
You can see this in many areas of recent humanity. The usual example is that we went from the
Wright Brothers and the pioneers of early flight, to the Apollo 11 landing on the moon
in significantly less than a century. Alot happened between 1903 and 1969. But there
are other examples, anyone that remembers flip phones might remember the talk about
how similar they were to Captain Kirk’s communicator in the original Star Trek series,
a kind of prediction in the late 60’s of a near future technology. But we’ve blown
past that, there’s very little in sci fi from decades ago that resembles smartphones,
and how a telephone, something that used to be a device for speaking at a distance over
phone lines, would become a handheld supercomputer that would send numerous other technologies
into obsolescence.
But there were visionaries, indeed Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted online banking
decades before the infrastructure needed to do that was in place. Another example would
be H. G. Wells predicting something like a nuclear bomb in “The World Set Free”.
But the reality is, in the ancient world, no one could have predicted our civilization
today. Indeed, no one 200 years ago could have predicted it, even though technological
innovation was already greatly at play, especially in the technology of warfare. For example,
the 19th century saw the evolution from flintlock rifles that could fire a round a minute, to
machine guns that fire 600 rounds a minute in only about 60 years.
Interestingly, where futurism gets things wrong very often, is when trying to predict
outside of technology. Predicting political change and the unfolding of history requires
more than just extrapolating technological advance. Indeed, in some sectors, we still
think in terms of coming better times as futurism, as in the soviet era futurism once did.
But there’s also the question of whether we are overplaying our hand in our predictions
of what may come to pass. There are always unknowns, and one involves potential blocks
to future technologies that might prevent some of the current predictions futurists
make. An example of this is direct brain to computer interfaces. One can tell one’s
self a story that this technology will be all encompassing within decades and we’ll
have such things as mind to mind direct communication.
And there are efforts to explore this, and the medical uses of it are beyond measure.
But to present the opposite argument, we only really have a rudimentary understanding of
the human brain. It’s possible we may never have a complete understanding of it sufficient
to allow for a seamless, real interbrain connection. And even if we could, there’s no guarantee
that thought to thought communication would be better than verbal, or more desirable.
It may not be. Indeed, it may be so intrusive no one wants it. Such things could easily
become the stuff of nightmares if you think about it.
This can be likened to the ancient empires of old. We may live in a time of technological
trend empires, where certain technologies are pursued for a time, and then ultimately
abandoned for lack of practicality in the real world. There was a time for example during
the atomic age where it was envisioned that nuclear detonations could be used to dig canals
in a grand nuclear excavation for the benefit of mankind. Obviously, this was not a good
idea, and didn’t take into account the peripheral costs of such an endeavor. There are things
we could be doing with existing technologies, that we do not, and the future may end up
the same way.
This is particularly relevant to things like artificial intelligence. We’re not yet close
to any danger zones with that technology, but there may come a day when we are, and
the end result is that we simply choose not to take that technology to its furthest extent.
Use AI for what it’s useful for, as opposed to creating an AI so capable that it could
become the new immortal earth emperor. One does not need to build the AI version of Napoleon
Bonaparte, to do the job of Albert Einstein.
But a major question lurks here, whether we will someday see technological stagnation,
and once again when pondering the future we return to the thinking of the greco-roman
world, hoping for a restoration of better times? This can happen in several potential
ways. One is that we eventually hit a technological brick wall, and we can’t push technological
development any further, due to expense, or it’s simply beyond our ability to advance
any further. Another option is if we simply decide to stop technological advancement if
it’s no longer doing us any real good, or even more, to avoid hitting the proverbial
singularity where technological advancement goes into incomprehensible territory.
We may also see a future where innovation stagnates due to a kind of utopian future
where all jobs are automated, and humans turn towards virtual realities and stop pursuing
technology beyond that, because most of life is lived in VR and there are huge differences
between real technologies, and virtual technologies. One does not need a television when they live
in the matrix, it has its own virtual ones.
But that also offers a rather odd possibility. That of virtual reality resurrections of ancient
cultures. If one wants to live in the age of the caesars, recreate it. Virtually any
period of human history can be reconstructed, but only so far as what we have in the historical
record. These simulations would be approximations of history, incorporating what we know, and
approximating the rest. Julius Caesar indeed could have never envisioned that some likeness
of him would exist again in the future. In some strange way, the Greco-Roman view of
the future ultimately will come true, and the prosperous times they once enjoyed will
come back in the form of a virtual reality reconstruction of their times.
And that goes for us as well. At some point in the future with perfected virtual reality,
someone may choose to resurrect our times. With our increasing amount of records and
data, a trend that’s not going to stop, our time period would be the first age that
could be reconstructed with a high degree of accuracy and precision in a virtual reality.
Ostensibly to the point that if you were to transport yourself a thousand years into the
future and enter such a reconstruction, you would very likely recognize most if not all
of it almost indistinguishable from your own time. The mistakes would generally be minor,
so long as the data from this time period is preserved indefinitely.
As strange as it may seem, simulations of us, or at least a few of us, are likely to
be a part of the future, and not too distantly as virtual reality technology improves. Much
as been made of the ability to use artificial intelligence and machine learning and a huge
amount of accumulated data taken during life to recreate people after they pass away. Some
form of this is coming, but in reality already exists in a rudimentary for through photographs
and videos. It’s just not yet widely available as next level interactive. This is something
the ancients could not have foreseen, or understood. But perhaps it might represent in some way
their ultimate dreaming of the future.
The current world, for all its faults and problems, is better than what came before
it. The return of happy times that they so wished for at times was in fact an accurate
prediction. The best of times lay ahead of the Romans and Greeks, and an age of astonishing
technology and space travel lay ahead, without them being able to envision it. It would become
a modern world where you can travel anywhere in the world on an aircraft in less time than
a Roman could do on foot walking to a nearby town. Medical science would dramatically extend
the average lifespan, nutrition would improve, agriculture would improve, and an entire hemisphere
of the world would be discovered with its peoples, foods, customs, and many other things
the Romans couldn’t have dreamed of.
The food is particularly interesting as an aside. If you showed someone from 1st century
Rome a potato, a turkey, a tomato, a chili pepper or an ear of corn, they wouldn’t
even know it was food until you told them. It works the same for the Americas, show a
Mayan some broccoli or an olive, and it would be the same result.
So maybe in the end history really is cyclic, just not in the way anyone had envisioned.
Ancient empires get resurrected in virtual reality, we sort of already do it with period
piece movies, and times of the past do return. But in the spirit of spooky october, I leave
you with this thought. Is there an upper limit to what can be reconstructed? If you don’t
know you're in a reconstruction, then you won’t know what’s inaccurate about it.
This means it becomes a simulation, in specific an ancestor simulation.
And if that’s the case, as pointed out famously by Nick Bostrum, then one of three things
must be true. Number 1, the amount of civilizations capable of creating an ancestor simulation
is almost zero. Number 2, Highly advanced civilizations don’t or can’t run such
simulations or number 3, we already live in a historical simulation of a universe of sorts.
A cyclic universe indeed.
Thanks for listening! I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently
thanking ToldInStone for a fun crossover collab, link to that channel in the description below,
but you can also hear a conversation I recently had with Garrett on my other channel, Event
Horizon, link in the description below, where we had a wonderful conversation about history,
a nice break from the usual weighty astrophysics and be sure to check out my books at your
favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations
into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.