SYSTEMS

Human society (as opposed to all the other societies out there...) keeps evolving and increasingly amalgamating with the technology it has spawned.

The Internet is still in its infancy and in all likelihood will  keep changing and evolving at the same amazing pace we have witnessed so far (unless corporations will succeed in cripling it). In some instances life will become easier, in others it will become a lot more complex.

Our ever increasing technical capabilities will combine in a myriad creative ways to spawn new methods and processes. Humanity's control over the world will increase and yet simultaneously things will become unbelievably complicated to the point where we, as individuals, can only hope to control a small fraction of the possibilities on offer. Us humans will increasingly have to  face our physical and mental limits (unless we expand these as well).

Already we find ourselves linked to society and the economy in tremendously complex ways. Our connections keep multiplying and all need to be maintained and fed with information. I need to access important current news, information from my personal networks, emails, all my bank accounts and social  media online:  facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin and all the others that will arise and are developing already.

Economic and technological advancement arguably came about to make work and life easier and to increase efficiencies/effectiveness. There was the (possibly utopian) hope that people would not have to work any longer, that we could have machines shoulder the hard labour while giving us humans more time to enjoy life and shirk the toil. 

Since the industrial revolution we have been freed from hard manual labour in many cases and to a certain extent menial process driven thinking as well. But instead of being freed to live life more fully, we have developed new ways to toil away (during work hours and after) in order pack ever more sensual experiences in to the few free minutes we have each day.

So here we find ourselves. Our personal lives and experiences are being commoditised and broken down into little bits of information that can be sold and traded and used to lure us into spending all our disposable income or more. If it is not already the case for many people, we will in the foreseeable future have to spend all of our waking time (and maybe our sleep?) on maintaining our communication channels. 

The physical value producing economy will increasingly have to be left to automated processes and robots.

Evidence of this can be found in automatically operated trains and other systems such as automated trading algorithms on the stock exchange.

The human will become the master at the top of the pyramid of systems and will increasingly become further removed from the basic operations and functions of society and the economy until...

Where will this end? Will we end up like the fat and imbecile humans in Andrew Stanton's comic but disturbing dystopian future in the movie Wall-e?

To be fair many parts of the world are still centuries away from any such vision but one can observe the beginnings in highly "developed" nations and societies where humans are only a controlling cog in a system of systems where the sole role is to exist/consume and keep the system running.

Will we in the end have one large system, for example the internet, that runs and regulates everything independently and only requires us to be alive and enjoy its benefits (there will of course be little choice to live a different life)?

Imagine the internet as the cyber equivalent of the physical world, where life and lifelike processes have evolved, keeping an automatic balance, like nature and the circle of life. Imagine this in the internet with apps and intelligences spawned to control and evolve the net and its system. Imagine as humans caught in between the two or living in two worlds at once.

Or will they eventually merge?