The technium—the modern system of culture and technology—is accelerating the creation of new impossibilities by continuing to invent new social organizations. The genius of eBay was its invention of cheap, easy, and quick reputation status. Strangers could sell to strangers at a great distance because we now had a technology to quickly assign persistent reputations to those beyond our circle. That lowly innovation opened up a new kind of higher-level coordination that permitted a new kind of exchange (remote purchasing among strangers) that was impossible before. The same kind of technologically enabled trust, plus real-time coordination, makes the decentralized taxi service Uber possible. The “revert log” button on Wikipedia, which made it easier to restore a vandalized passage than to vandalize it, unleashed a new higher organization of trust, emphasizing one facet of human behavior not enabled at a large scale before.
We have just begun to fiddle with social communications. Hyperlinks, wifi, and GPS location services are really types of relationships enabled by technology, and this class of innovations is just beginning. The majority of the most amazing communication inventions that are possible have not been invented yet. We are also just in the infancy of being able to invent institutions at a truly global scale. When we weave ourselves together into a global real-time society, former impossibilities will really start to erupt into reality. It is not necessary that we invent some kind of autonomous global consciousness. It is only necessary that we connect everyone to everyone else—and to everything else—all the time and create new things together. Hundreds of miracles that seem impossible today will be possible with this shared human connectivity.
I am looking forward to having my mind changed a lot in the coming years. I think we’ll be surprised by how many of the things we assumed were “natural” for humans are not really natural at all. It might be fairer to say that what is natural for a tribe of mildly connected humans will not be natural for a planet of intensely connected humans. “Everyone knows” that humans are warlike, but I would guess organized war will become less attractive, or useful, over time as new means of social conflict resolution arise at a global level. Of course, many of the impossible things we can expect will be impossibly bad. The new technologies will unleash whole new ways to lie, cheat, steal, spy, and terrorize. We have no consensual international rules for cyberconflict, which means we can expect some very nasty unexpected “impossible” cyber events in the coming decade. Because of our global connectivity, a relatively simple hack could cause an emerging cascade of failure, which would reach impossible scale very quickly. Worldwide disruptions of our social fabric are in fact inevitable. One day in the next three decades the entire internet/phone system will blink off for 24 hours, and we’ll be in shock for years afterward.
I don’t focus on these expected downsides in this book for several reasons. First, there is no invention that cannot be subverted in some way to cause harm. Even the most angelic technology can be weaponized, and will be. Criminals are some of the most creative innovators in the world. And crap constitutes 80 percent of everything. But importantly, these negative forms follow exactly the same general trends I’ve been outlining for the positive. The negative, too, will become increasingly cognified, remixed, and filtered. Crime, scams, warring, deceit, torture, corruption, spam, pollution, greed, and other hurt will all become more decentralized and data centered. Both virtue and vice are subject to the same great becoming and flowing forces. All the ways that startups and corporations need to adjust to ubiquitous sharing and constant screening apply to crime syndicates and hacker squads as well. Even the bad can’t escape these trends.
Additionally, it may seem counterintuitive, but every harmful invention also provides a niche to create a brand-new never-seen-before good. Of course, that newly minted good can then be (and probably will be) abused by a corresponding bad idea. It may seem that this circle of new good provoking new bad which provokes new good which spawns new bad is just spinning us in place, only faster and faster. That would be true except for one vital difference: On each round we gain additional opportunities and choices that did not exist before. This expansion of choices (including the choice to do harm) is an increase in freedom—and this increase in freedoms and choices and opportunities is the foundation of our progress, of our humanity, and of our individual happiness.
Our technological spinning has thrown us up to a new level, opening up an entirely new continent of unknown opportunities and scary choices. The consequences of global-scale interactions are beyond us. The amount of data and power needed is inhuman; the vast realms of peta-, exa-, zetta-, zillion don’t really mean anything to us today because this is the vocabulary of megamachines, and of planets. We will certainly behave differently collectively than as individuals, but we don’t know how. Much more important, as individuals we behave differently in collectives.
This has been true for humans for a long while, ever since we moved to cities and began building civilizations. What’s new now and in the coming decades is the velocity of this higher territory of connectivity (speed of light), and its immensely vaster scale (the entire planet). We are headed for a trillion times increase. As noted earlier, a shift by a trillion is not merely a change in quantity, but a change in essence. Most of what “everybody knows” about human beings has so far been based on the human individual. But there may be a million different ways to connect several billion people, and each way will reveal something new about us. Or each way may create in us something new. Either way, our humanity will shift.
Connected, in real time, in multiple ways, at an increasingly global scale, in matters large and small, with our permission, we will operate at a new level, and we won’t cease surprising ourselves with impossible achievements. The impossibility of Wikipedia will quietly recede into outright obviousness.
In addition to hard-to-believe emergent phenomenon, we are headed to a world where the improbable is the new normal. Cops, emergency room doctors, and insurance agents see a bit of this already. They realize how many crazy impossible things actually happen all the time. For instance, a burglar gets stuck in a chimney; a truck driver in a head-on collision is thrown out his front window and lands on his feet, walking away; a wild antelope galloping across a bike trail knocks a man off his bicycle; a candle at a wedding ignites the bride’s hair on fire; a girl casually fishing off a backyard dock catches a huge man-size shark. In former times these unlikely events would be private, known only as rumors, stories a friend of a friend told, easily doubted and not really believed.
But today they are on YouTube, and they fill our vision. You can see them yourself. Each of these weird freakish events has been seen by millions.
The improbable consists of more than just accidents. The internets are also brimming with improbable feats of performance—someone who can run up a side of a building, or slide down suburban rooftops on a snowboard, or stack up cups faster than you can blink. And not just humans—pets open doors, ride scooters, and paint pictures. The improbable also includes extraordinary levels of superhuman achievements: people doing astonishing memory tasks, or imitating all the accents of the world. In these extreme feats we see the super in humans.