From Fog to Confusion —— Where will mankind go in the future?

The context of human development seems clear, but in fact it is foggy. On two key issues, one is where human beings come from and the other is where they will go. Although historians, archaeologists, biologists, anthropologists and other scholars have conducted in-depth research on these two issues, they have never reached a convincing conclusion.

First of all, there seem to be many clues about the origin of human beings, but how Homo sapiens, as one of the "terrans", stands out from all the major "races" so that only Homo sapiens has evolved so far, and historians and biologists have been divided. Nowadays, more and more scholars question Darwin's theory of racial evolution, especially the prehistoric human beings developed many kinds of animals similar to modern people. About100000 years ago, in addition to homo sapiens, the ancestor of modern people, there were Neanderthals, Denisova and other races. Moreover, according to scientific research, Neanderthals had more developed muscles and bigger brains at the same time. They also use tools and fire, and they have good hunting skills. They also have the concept of community, which can take care of the sick and the weak. But why didn't they replace Homo sapiens and breed modern civilization? This seems to run counter to Darwin's view of "natural selection, survival of the fittest, survival of the fittest".

Secondly, with the vigorous development of human civilization today, we have seen the diversity of human destiny in the future. Where will mankind go from here? Is it a global devastating war, or is it doomed by natural force majeure, or is the development of immortal technology of organic life or artificial intelligence replacing human intelligence and entering the stage of "God" civilization? Despite all kinds of speculations and predictions, the "singularity" of the ultimate fate of mankind has not yet arrived. At present, after all, we can't exhaust all our imaginations about the future destiny, and we can't draw any conclusions. However, it is undeniable that human culture has begun to break free from the shackles of biology. Now we can not only transform the world around us, but also transform our inner heart and inner world, and the development speed is extremely fast. Maybe this century, maybe the next Millennium, we are expected to experience the ultimate destination of mankind.

Next, let's discuss several representative predictions about the future fate of mankind.

In addition, with the rapid development of globalization, it is becoming more and more difficult to profit from the war. In the past, under the traditional war mode, material wealth was often accumulated on a large scale through war. For example, in the first two world wars, the process of dividing the sphere of influence of European and American powers was also to divide the world wealth through wars, thus forming a new world political and economic pattern. After the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, countries around the world have increasingly formed a global integration pattern through economic, trade, political and cultural exchanges. In layman's terms, no one can live without anyone. Considering the overall interests, maintaining peace has become the common goal of all countries.

We have to add such a possibility to the future fate of mankind when we think of the destruction scene of an asteroid that made dinosaurs extinct hitting the earth. Perhaps one day, with the gradual destruction of natural ecology by human beings, species extinction, resource depletion, environmental pollution, ecological deterioration, and the role of natural factors (super volcanic eruption, sea level rise, persistent extreme weather, asteroid impact on the earth, etc.). ), the achievements of civilization that we have spent tens of thousands of years may be destroyed in an instant. We live in an era of rapid development of science and technology and rich material civilization. More and more people believe that man can conquer nature, but there is nothing we can do about earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods and asteroid impacts.

So if human beings can enter the sacred civilization, can they get rid of the control of natural forces and gain higher-dimensional power?

In fact, since mankind entered 2 1 century, the speed of scientific and technological development is visible to the naked eye. To give a few representative examples, the first is the completion of the human genome sequence map. On June 26th, 2000, US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair jointly announced the completion of the first draft genome in human history. 2001February 12, scientists from China, the United States, Japan, Germany, France and Britain jointly published the human genome map and preliminary analysis results. This is an important milestone in the history of human exploration of their own mysteries, and is regarded by many experts as the symbol of the birth of the biotechnology century. The human genome contains most of the genetic information of human birth, aging, disease and death. Deciphering it will bring a revolution to the diagnosis of human diseases, the development of new drugs and the exploration of new treatments.

The second is cell reprogramming technology. By implanting new genes into cells, changing the development "memory" of cells and returning them to the most primitive embryonic development state, they can differentiate like embryonic stem cells. Such cells are called "induced pluripotent stem cells". The development of this technology will be of great significance for researchers to understand how diseases occur and develop, to promote the screening of potential drugs in the medical field, and to use autologous healthy cells to treat diseases.

The development of the third quantum computer. From June 5438 to February 2020, China's nine-chapter all-photon system ran for 200 seconds and successfully solved the mathematical algorithm of Gaussian Bose sampling. At present, the fastest supercomputer in the world needs 600 million years. This breakthrough has made China the second country in the world to achieve "quantum superiority". On February 8th, 20021year, Hefu Benyuan Quantum Technology Co., Ltd., the transformation platform of scientific and technological achievements of the Key Laboratory of Quantum Information of Chinese Academy of Sciences, released Benyuan Sina, a quantum computer operating system with intellectual property rights. This series of achievements not only reflects China's strong development momentum in the field of science and technology, but also provides strong technical support for exploring the ultimate destiny of mankind.

We know that quantum computer has powerful quantum information processing ability, which can extract effective information from the current massive information and process it to make it become new useful information. On the other hand, quantum computers have powerful computing power and can analyze a large number of different data at the same time. Theoretically, it also has the ability to simulate any natural system, and it is also the key to develop artificial intelligence. Some people define 2 1 century as the century of artificial intelligence. In the future, the development of artificial intelligence will no longer focus on machine intelligence, but on the human brain, thus improving the basic performance of the machine itself and making it closer to the structure and functional mechanism of the human brain. As we said earlier, biotechnology has further deepened the study of the human brain and the development of quantum computers, revealed the working principle and mechanism of the brain, and created completely autonomous artificial intelligence by using the powerful computing power of quantum computing, which seems to be no longer a fantasy. The law of natural selection is gradually broken, and the law of intelligent design will gradually affect the future destiny of mankind.

Billions of years of biological evolution has always followed the most basic law of natural selection. The evolution of human civilization, especially after the awakening of consciousness, the agricultural revolution and the scientific and technological revolution, has become more and more capable of breaking away from this choice mode and becoming a purposeful intelligent design stage.

The three most typical possibilities are bioengineering, bionic engineering and inorganic life engineering.

Bioengineering refers to "deliberate human intervention (such as gene implantation) at the biological level, aiming at changing the form, ability, needs or desires of organisms, so as to realize a certain preset cultural concept". In fact, bioengineering is not a new concept. For thousands of years, human beings have also used bioengineering to reshape themselves and other creatures. For example, castration technology, which is common in farming civilization, aims to reduce the aggression of male livestock and achieve a state of obedience and domestication.

In ancient times, eunuchs also used castration to assist in state affairs. However, with the breakthrough of human science and technology in the field of cells and nuclei, the research on the operation of organisms has been deepened. With the present technology, human beings can completely change their sex through surgery and hormone injection. There are also well-known cloning technology, genetic modification technology, chimera technology of human organs in animals and so on. Genetic engineering can create more and more miracles. Of course, this has also triggered a series of ethical, political and ideological debates. Some human rights groups worry that genetic engineering may create some superhuman beings in the future, and as a result, ordinary people will gradually become their slaves. Others worry that if this technology is applied to the military field, it is likely to create soldiers who don't know what fear is. Will there be an unscrupulous "new human" war in the future?

The second possibility is bionic life. Bionic engineering can combine organic and inorganic tissues to create a "biochemical person". A typical example is biochemical hand technology. At present, the biochemical arm can be interconnected with human brain thinking. By installing a microcomputer chip on the biochemical arm, the neural signals sent by the brain can be converted into electronic signal instructions, thus directing the movement of the arm. In the future, we have reason to believe that the biochemical hand can not only move at will, but also send back signals to the brain, that is, it can even restore the amputee's sense of touch.

At present, in all the bionic engineering research, the most revolutionary thing is to establish a direct two-way interface between the brain and the computer, so that the computer can read the electrical signals of the human brain and return the electrical signals that the human brain can understand. What if this device is successful, the brain is directly connected to the network, or several brains are interconnected to form a "brain-to-brain network"? Perhaps one day in the future, our brains can enjoy memories, that is, everyone will become a "biochemical person". You can extract other people's memories, just like your own. Through the memory of others, the world you can know will expand infinitely. But there will be a new problem here. What will happen to our self-identity under collective memory? In short, how to know ourselves and what are our personal dreams? How can you be sure that it's not a personal wish born of collective memory? Maybe by that time, the biochemical race will become a new race independently. This change is fundamental, and its philosophical, psychological or political influence may be beyond our control.

The two possibilities of bioengineering and biochemical engineering mentioned above can be regarded as a development of life form from organic to semi-organic, but now we are talking about the possibility of changing the law of life and creating an inorganic life, namely artificial intelligence.

The invention of the electronic computer can be said to be one of the major scientific and technological achievements that changed the 20th century, and it has had an extremely important impact on human production and social activities. With the continuous updating of this technology, the field of gene programming has also evolved. This programming imitates the genetic evolution of genes. Many programmers want to create a program that can learn and evolve independently from the creator. In this case, the programmer is just a driving force. After the program was started, it began to evolve freely, and the creator and anyone else could not grasp its development direction. Computer virus can be regarded as the prototype of this program. When computer viruses spread on the Internet, they will constantly replicate themselves for millions to hundreds of millions of times. On the one hand, they have to avoid the antivirus software they are chasing, on the other hand, they have to compete with other viruses for space in the network. Another time, the virus made a mistake when replicating itself and became a computerized mutation. This mutation may be due to the random replication error of the virus caused by the virus designer at first, or it may be due to some random error. Assuming that under accidental circumstances, the mutated virus can escape the detection of anti-virus software and still retain the ability to invade other computers, then it will spread rapidly in the network. As a result, this mutant can survive and start to reproduce. Over time, cyberspace will be full of this new virus designed by people and evolved through inorganic.

Many people may not think that this computer virus is a kind of life, but it was born from a new evolutionary program, completely independent of the laws and restrictions of organic evolution. The development of artificial intelligence is a challenge to the laws of nature. Whether intelligently designed inorganic life can break away from human control and turn to self-evolution is also a key step for human science and technology to break through itself and move towards "divine" civilization in the future. At present, human beings have gradually developed from traditional classical computers to vector computers, which provides strong technical support for the development of artificial intelligence. The development of artificial intelligence is inseparable from three elements: data, algorithm and computing power. At present, artificial intelligence is developing to high application stages such as multi-scene, scale and integration, and the amount of data is exploding, and the parameters of algorithm model are increasing exponentially. The quantum computer's powerful computing and analysis capabilities for big data and its ability to simulate natural scenes can enable artificial intelligence to break through the bottleneck of development. However, when artificial intelligence can really form self-awareness, have self-control desire and produce "life" characteristics, where will our human destiny go?

In many sci-fi movies, the hypothetical scene is that one day in the future, artificial intelligence will be out of human control, killing human beings and leading to human extinction. The only remaining human followers either crossed the past to find the so-called savior and destroyed it in the early stage of artificial intelligence, or launched the final man-machine war, and finally defeated artificial intelligence through the spiritual power of human emotions. No matter what kind of scene is a true representation of the future, it shows human concerns about the development of artificial intelligence, an inorganic life. But even with all kinds of concerns, the pace of scientific and technological progress has been unable to stop the future development of artificial intelligence. In a sense, human beings are trying to become "creators" and get rid of the shackles of the laws of life.

Is the "singularity moment" of mankind approaching, the light of America? Kurzweil's Singularity approximation boldly predicts that the human body will evolve into an immaterial and freely deformable form through gene, nanotechnology and robotics. In 2045, human singularity will come, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence in an all-round way, and human history will be completely changed. Civilization will go beyond the limitations of the brain, and human consciousness will be transformed into data, which can be stored and transmitted like all data now. When human existence becomes a kind of data, it can transmit itself at the speed of "light", and people can leave the body and reach any corner of the universe. We will be the masters of the universe.

From this point of view, our generation is lucky, because while we are still "alive", it is possible to witness the immortality of mankind. Singularity is unimaginable, it is a brand-new state. In the scene of prophecy, I feel as if it is really the imagination of the upgrading dimension of human civilization. From three-dimensional space to higher-dimensional space, no creature in three-dimensional space can imagine what high-dimensional space looks like. Perhaps, predictable but unimaginable is the ultimate destination of mankind! ! !