The post-information age: new horizons for business and education

Business Horizons, Nov-Dec, 1993 by Jerome C. Glenn

Historians tell us that a positive vision of the future is essential for a healthy civilization. Our contemporary future vision is deadlocked over the argument between those who believe that changing consciousness will make a better world and those who believe that technology is the only investment that matters. One new vision of the post-information age, called "conscious technology," resolves this argument by merging these orientations.

Humans are becoming more machine-like with the internalization of technology, and technology is becoming more human-like, with the advent of voice recognition, voice synthesis, artificial intelligence, and transceivers built into everything. With the miniaturization of technology, we are increasingly able to replace organs and amplify our biological capacity, thus becoming cyborgs--people who are dependent on technology for some vital function.

We can effectively link our bodies with the entire world for thought and action. This may all seem quite speculative, but consider that 50 percent of Americans are already temporary cyborgs by virtue of wearing glasses or contact lenses. All astronauts and deep sea divers are temporary cyborgs.

The brain-computer interface is advancing with the use of "nerve chips," which are being developed by the Stanford University Medical Center as electronic interfaces for individual nerve cells to communicate with a computer. In experiments to regenerate damaged nerves, nerve axons of rats are currently growing inside implanted nerve chips. In the future, these bionic elements will be used to program artificial hands and enhance human capability in ways not yet imagined.

In the United States, sales in artificial biology jumped to more than $1 billion in 1983, during which three million transplants were performed. That number climbed to 3.6 million in 1985, and rose to more than four million transplants a year in 1993. The whole thrust of cyborg advances is to take the best of our external technology, miniaturize it, and make it part of our bodies. The Jarvik heart, the Utah arm, artificial kidneys, the Boston elbow, miniature pancreas-like pumps, the Triad hip, heart pacemakers, microelectronically driven limbs, plastic skin, and artificial bones all exemplify the growth in cyborg technology. Bionics began by restoring human capability; soon it will enhance human capacity. Zoom vision, distant shotgun hearing, and Herculean strength could become normal abilities by the middle of the twenty-first century.

The miniaturization of technology is progressing so rapidly that machines will be constructed molecule by molecule and atom by atom. We could have thousands of mini-robots running through our bodies. Legions of bionic bacteria could make sure that strategic parts of our bodies are working optimally. All this could be on-line. We will all become the "six-million-dollar man," hooked to global telecommunications--once the price comes down.

Simultaneously, the whole thrust of advances in electronics is to take the best of our consciousness, simulate it in computer programs, and make it part of our environment. This will render inanimate objects immediately responsive to our thoughts. We can already talk to computers that recognize more than 20,000 words, giving us the uncanny feeling that they are sentient. Even buildings have sensors that make them seem alive. With advancing computer power, micro-miniaturization, and voice recognition, we can tell many inanimate objects what to do and they can tell us what to do. Our whole environment will seem to change from dumb matter to one of conscious partnership as we tell our telephones to phone home, our lights to turn off, and our music to turn on.

Concurrent with these developments is a veritable explosion in human consciousness. Consciousness creates technology, which in turn expands our consciousness, which in turn improves our technology, ad infinitum. Technology is a mirror of consciousness. Looking into this mirror changes our consciousness. We need not look like those revolting science fiction images of half-machine, half-flesh monsters. And we need not have technology that becomes our conscious enemy--like HAL in "2001: A Space Odyssey." We can create an aesthetic continuum of human civilization and technology.

We in the 1990s are still prejudiced against this merger of life and machine--even though it is the fundamental trend of our age. The future of science and technology is driven by ideas. How we manage ideas determines the rate and quality of scientific discovery and technological applications. Wise leaders are formulating their science and technology policy differently than did their forebears. in the past, science was largely an individual effort. As it grew more complex, and equipment became more expensive, it evolved into a group effort. Today it has become an international on-line effort involving governments and the private sector. Increasingly it will be augmented by partnerships with intelligent machines. This means that the speed and ease of scientific inquiry will increase radically in the twenty-first century. As a result, the human role of setting direction will become far more critical than in the past. Moreover, consequences of poor or haphazard scientific policy will be more disastrous.