OCTOBER 26, 2011
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| EMAIL | SINGLE PAGE The Man Who Knew Too Much - By David Rieff 599 people recommend this.
TechnoolgyW TalkieonaLfeo itsO Ifwn
Outside the Law - By Eric A. Posner 177 people recommend this.
Welcome to the Hybrid Age. BY AYESHA KHANNA, PARAG KHANNA | SEPT/OCT 2011
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IN THE THIRD WAVE, the Tofflers foresaw that advanced societies would no longer be content to see humankind as the pinnacle of evolution. Instead, they wrote, we are moving into a brave new world where knowledge will become an inexhaustible commodity and transform not just our economies but more deeply our sense of who we are -- and "not just for a generation, but forever," as they put it. A generation later, it is time to revive the Tofflers' methodology as we try to understand an incipient future in which technology has insinuated itself into every sphere and nook of human activity -- from the manipulation and replication of DNA to space exploration -- and in which humans continuously seek ways to speed up their biological evolution to match the breakneck pace of technological evolution. The only way to do that is to incrementally integrate with technology, launching an era of change and innovation that we call the Hybrid Age. If the first wave was agrarian and tribal, the second industrial and national, and the third informational and transnational, then the Hybrid Age is what the Tofflers might call the "Fourth Wave." In this new era, human evolution has become human-technology coevolution: We're becoming part of the machine, and it is becoming part of us. There is no adequate word in English to capture this complex entanglement of humans and technology. The German word Technik comes closest: It means not just technology, but the mastery of the methods and processes that shape and steer it. In today's emerging world, Technik can be something of a broad index of preparedness for the future Hybrid Age. It rejoins the scientific and mechanical dimensions of technology with a necessary concern for its effect on humans and society. So while today we talk about promoting democracy, tomorrow we will realize we should be promoting good Technik. Five characteristics differentiate this Hybrid Age from those that came before it: the ubiquitous presence of technology, its growing intelligence, its increasingly social dimensions, its ability to integrate and combine in new forms, and its growing power to disrupt, faster and on a larger scale than ever before in human history.
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First, computers have become exponentially more powerful and cheaper at the same time. This trend is likely to continue for at least another decade, after which DNA computing -- literally using enzymes and molecules instead of silicon chips -- could bring us even cheaper nanoscale computers. Soon, extremely small computing machines and sensors will move from our smartphones and
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