Systems last if they are resilient to shocks. If they are fragile, they break and disappear. A technology is a successful system. The wheel is a system, language is a system, computers are a system, the human body is a system, nature is a system. And these are systems that were resilient to shocks and thrived. They ‘worked’, they became technologies.
The technologies that thrive are resilient because they mimic nature. When you mimic nature, you mimic a resilient system. Take a computer for example; it has a memory, processing power and input and output capabilities it can apply to a wide range of tasks. Sounds a lot like a brain. Brains have been around for 4B years, so the better a new system is at mimicking a system like that, the more resilient the new system becomes.
Most new technologies in the present are solving problems created by old technologies in the past. Look at the problem of crowded cities: we invented technology to build skyscrapers to solve this. When a shock hits, like an earthquake, we work hard to develop new technologies to make the skyscraper resilient to such old shocks. The new technologies we invent today create new problems that have yet to be solved by new technologies in the future. This is the force that drives the arrow of technological progress.
When we put this all together there is an interesting thesis that emerges:
The ultimate technology known to us, nature, created a new technology, humanity, to solve its old problems.
Is humanity just the singularity of nature?
If we see nature as just earth, a multi-planetary species and terraforming could be the answer to earth’s problems. If we see nature as the whole universe, humanity could be the tech that locally accelerates entropy and pushes the universe towards its heat death, which then catapults it into the next level? And what about AI? Will AI be to us what humans are to nature? A system that solves our problems? (by now my head is spinning).
Whatever the future brings, we are a pretty neat technology and will keep on working on technological progress. It’s thanksgiving today, so time for me to go eat some turkey!