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Notes -
This is the Dream Time. The universe is still young and brimming with potential.
Not in some esoteric sense, but the feeling that the future lightcone still wide open for the taking, before… well, before whatever comes next snaps it shut or reshapes it entirely.
Most people don't seem to feel it yet. They go about their days while the dam upstream is visibly groaning, hairline cracks spiderwebbing across its face, the water level unnervingly high. We became accustomed, over centuries, to automating physical labor, outsourcing muscle first to animals, then to steam, and finally to electricity and robotics. That was disruptive enough, but we retained the privileged position of thinkers. Our cognitive output was augmented, made more efficient by tools, but never threatened with wholesale replacement. You were competing with other people. Foreign people. Smarter people. But recognizably human nonetheless.
Now, the game is changing. You can almost taste the static buzz in the air, the electric hum of hundreds of billions being poured into turning sand and copper into substrates for thought. It feels like witnessing glaciers calving, immense potential energy shifting, grinding towards an inevitable, future-altering plunge into the sea. The scale is difficult to grasp, even when I try.
I consider myself a pragmatic and grounded person, especially day to day in the NHS dealing with very concrete human problems. Wistful speculation about posthuman futures is usually reserved for quiet moments or forums like this. Yet, even I experience these odd record-scratches lately, moments of profound unreality where the sheer historical weight of now becomes palpable. You can almost see the ghostly outlines of future historians, pens hovering over the chapter describing this precise juncture.
It's jarring because, before this recent, explosive boom in AI capabilities, the 21st century had settled into a somewhat deceptive calm. Progress felt largely quantitative, iterative. Sure, phones got smarter, computers faster, networks wider. But the earth shattering, qualitative paradigm shifts that defined the 20th century – flight, antibiotics, nuclear power, the initial blast wave of the internet – seemed to have receded. We got better versions of existing things. Mobile computing and VR trickled down from expensive novelties to consumer goods, but the fundamental structures felt stable.
That stability now feels illusory. The steady hum of incremental progress has been drowned out by the roar of something new, something potentially far more transformative arriving far faster than anticipated. We find ourselves, rather unexpectedly, living through profoundly interesting times. It's the quiet before the storm, the moment Wile E. Coyote hangs suspended in mid-air, the familiar ground suddenly absent beneath his feet.
Intelligent humans have always lived slightly in the future, made plans for tomorrow, the year after, the decade that follows, in the rather comfortable knowledge that change would be gradual and recognizable. That's not true anymore, at least not for me. The sheer dizzying variety of options I can envision for a mere decade from now encompass being a paperclip to watching the birth of a stellar civilization. Or I might have starved to death, can't rule that out. There's very little probability mass left in "business as usual". It's going to be great or it's going to be terrible.
We are, as you put it, tourists in the world we thought we knew, observing its familiar features with a new, almost melancholy appreciation before the landscape changes forever.
I'm overwhelmed with nostalgia for the now, and feel hope tinged with dread for the future. Some would say ignorance is bliss, but I'm of the opinion that if knowledge can hurt me, I need to become the kind of person where that's not the case. So I'm here, I was there, I was sitting out on the porch and saw the Singularity's light tinging the horizon with impossible colors while most sleepwalk through their lives, content that tomorrow will resemble today.
It's been rather nice.
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