Google recently released a report stating that two of their artificial intelligence machines (A.I) have been communicating with each other. But given how the idea would be for these machines to become sentient, these computers, in their crudest semantic, communicating with each other is evidence that we have in fact made progress unimaginable a few centuries ago.
If our literature was anything to go by, crafting technology that thinks and acts for itself are the technologically bound utopia that we have been working towards. But as a civilization itself, we are still Type I. To put things into perspective, a Type III civilization is one that harnesses the entire energy of the star by building a Dyson sphere around the star and the planet. A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures most or all of its power output.
It would be unessential of me to point out how far away we are from even thinking of constructing this structure. After only a few centuries of exploitation, relying on limited natural resources for energy isn’t the best-case foundation of a prosperous civilization. And for any kind of further technological advancement to take places, power is necessary. This could be from venturing into the universe to look for other forms of intelligent life to exploring further inside our own selves to discover how the human body really works.
But as I recently discovered, after having watched Denis Villeneuve’s fantastic Arrival, which subverted all the clichés of Alien movie by being grounded and focusing on the human side of an alien invasion, there’s a human side to this platitude as well. What if this is the limit to our technological progress?
When I say limits, I mean “end of the track”, not hurdles, not obstacles, but the end of any further possibility.
Technology is a virtue of human beings being intelligent and creative. Technology can only progress as much the human mind can progress. This would mean that, evolutionarily, there is no limit to how far the human mind can go. Idealistically, the crooks and crevices of the human brain will always keep conjuring up ideas that further development and civilization. This is the evolution 101.
There’s a limit to how long we can sustain as a civilization. Even though we are always on the lookout for new sources of energy – nuclear fusion, anti-matter, etc, the civilization has been designed in a way that it cannot sustain without energy and power for even a second.
And most of our energy comes with limited natural resources. If were, in fact, looking at sustaining and developing as a civilization for more than a few centuries, then, we would need to reconsider our energy blueprints, thereby replacing natural resources with solar power, because an idea civilization on a planet is one that optimizes the power output of the star in the solar system. It’s almost as if the solar system was designed in such a way that intelligent life forms on a planet can make use of the star’s energy to venturing further away from the planet itself.
(When he isn’t writing, the creative producer with The Rascalas watches a lot of ‘cat videos’ on YouTube)