Waves
From Gothpoodle
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Revision as of 13:24, 14 June 2010
In the 1980s, the futurist Alvin Toffler pointed out that technological change sometimes caused radical shifts in culture and society. Such a change would sweep across the world like a “wave,” transforming institutions and worldviews, bringing a new kind of civilization into existence in a relatively short time. The results would be so significant that societies on opposite sides of a Wave would literally be inhabiting different worlds.
Toffler spoke of three Waves. The First Wave was triggered by the discovery of agriculture perhaps 10,000 years ago. The Second Wave corresponded with the Industrial Revolution, which began about 1800. The Third Wave that Toffler predicted was associated with the spread of digital computers and information networks, beginning about 1960. Toffler’s vision was correct in many specifics, mistaken in others – but in 2100, people use the concept of “waves of change” in deadly earnest. In the past century, two more such Waves have swept across the world, further complicating the process of human history.
The Fourth Wave involved the spread of genetic technology, beginning with the sequencing of human DNA at the beginning of the century, culminating with the “biogenesis revolution” and the appearance of variant human subspecies in the 2050s. Today’s futurists disagree about what constitutes the Fifth Wave, but almost all agree that its early stages are already transforming the world. Candidates for the central technology of the evolving Fifth Wave civilization include nanotechnology, memetics and powerful artificial intelligence.
Each Wave overlies the previous ones, but does not replace them. The result is “future shock,” the collision of unready human individuals with an utterly new form of society. Today, the dizzying speed of technological change means that all five Waves coexist on the same planet, subsistence farmers living side by side with gengineered parahumans and superhuman AI. The world is in a constant state of future shock. This accounts for many of today’s cultural phenomena, from reactionary Preservationists who desperately reject change, to radical Transhumanists who embrace it.
