I recently wrote the following for an application to Google’s Singularity University. I think it will provide our readers here with a deeper insight into what drives me and drives this blog.
I am first and foremost an individual – at once both a marketing professional, a “supplement freak”, a social theorist, and an armchair philosopher. To me, singularity is not simply about the accelerating change we are experiencing, but about a macroevolution of consciousness. As humans interact and merge with the technologies, we remain human, but our machines become more lifelike than lifeless. This will have grand implications for the way we perceive the world and the way we interact with technology. While I was always interested in computers, programming, and technology and had mused about the impact of future advances, my first real encounter with technology as an evolutionary phenomenon was during a visionary experience. During this short moment in the woods near Kutztown, Pennsylvania I saw the primal force of “nature” transform from plant to proto-human to myself, and as I perceived the path of “nature” extend through myself I saw the future: man merging with machine. What has fascinated me about this is the false dichotomy in our culture between nature and technology, with humans acting as this world bridging link. Since then my intellectual explorations have taken me from Ray Kurzweil to Timothy Leary, from Terence McKenna to Jared Diamond, and from the Tao-Te-Ching to the Merck Manual. I have been searching for what the future should be and how the future can be right now. Through my intellectual pursuits and my social and professional experiences I have been able to see the grand potential for everyone around the world to bridge this dichotomy and engineer their own futures. Technology has been praised and persecuted for many things, but at the end of the day it is a tool – a sacrament that promises salvation if we use it with the right intentions.
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