Transhumanism to Posthuman

Some people today envision a future where human beings will have evolved beyond our bodies to a super artificially intelligent posthuman that may or may not inhabit a body (biological or robotic). They see the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) as a dream come true and they want to encourage and support AI so that AI can free us from our biological constraints and usher in a utopia. Others, transhumanists, see AI as a tool for us to enhance our human limitations and incorporate AI into a cyborg-like utopian future. These transhumanists also want to encourage and support AI with a utopian future in mind. And many others see AI as only an important tool for business and other uses. How should we see and deal with AI in our lives today?

Transhumans or cyborgs are here today. People today with pacemakers, advanced prosthetics, cochlear implants, or other technological implants can be considered real-live cyborgs. They may not be like the Six Million Dollar Man from that old TV show who had superhuman capabilities, but they do have technological enhancements. And I also would argue that it is not much different than the basic tools we use today. Smart phones seem to almost be body parts for some people, but even a simple lever enhances our capabilities. So in some ways, we have been enhancing our abilities since Adam and Eve, and God started the technology enhancements with the technology of clothing (Genesis 3:21).

Today’s hype is all about enhancing our brain power with AI. Will that make us all cyborgs? Will that lead us to “evolve” beyond our biological selves to this posthuman future? Technology has always changed society. Unfortunately we do not always see the downsides of new technology. Social media is here to stay and it can be a good way to stay in contact with people. However, social media is also addictive and can create echo chambers of like thinking. AI has already been shown to be addictive when it becomes a companion. We need to evaluate the new technology, like AI, to make certain it is a good tool for us. You need to figure out what the cost of this new technology is.

Technology has a tendency to isolate, so does this technology help or hinder social relationships?
In making life easier in one part of your life, does this technology make another part of your life more difficult?
Does this technology make life easier for one segment of society at a cost to another segment of society?
Does this technology satisfy a felt need while costing you some real needs?

You need to evaluate any new technology. One may need to not use this technology if the cost is too high, or to limit its use to prevent addictions and harm to others. What is the cost of AI today? What will be the cost tomorrow when AI is much more powerful? How will it change society? How for the better and how for the worse? These are questions to ask and to decide what we can do and whether this is a technology that is good to use or not.

Note I only explored the posthuman future from an AI superintelligence viewpoint. Others see the posthuman future with biologically modified humans to be like elves, dwarves, dog-people, cat-people, vampires, and the like. This view also aims to free us from our biological constraints by modifying them.

As Christians, we know who we are and whose we are (Galatians 2:20). We have a God who loves us (1John 4:19), became human for us (John 1:1,14), and died for us (Romans 5:6-8). We are sons and daughters of the Heavenly King (2 Corinthians 6:18). We are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), so we are not constrained by our biology, because it is God who formed us (Psalm 139:13-16). We are who we are in order to serve him by serving others (Ephesians 2:10). Transhumanism and Posthumanism is all about using technology to become like God (Genesis 11:4). We are not God.

Let me leave you with this quote from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg from a podcast (found in this AP article). “When people in the tech industry talk about building this one true AI, it’s almost as if they think they’re creating God or something.”

This post was inspired in part by the article “Resisting a Posthuman Future” by C. Ben Mitchell, found in the Summer 2025 edition of the Concordia Journal on page 21.

Super Intelligent AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here or close to being here now and artificial superintelligence (ASI) will be here in two years (2027) according to the “AI Futures Project”, which is a nonprofit forecasting the future of AI. Wait! The AI we see does some amazing things but I am not certain I would call it intelligent. We have been disappointed. However, you can argue that the AI we see out in public is several months behind what is in the labs. The AI Futures Project says the world will be totally changed by 2030. It will then be an AI economy.

This change, if correct, is happening much faster than I had imagined. But I can not deny the work they put into creating this forecast. (Here is a summary of the results of their work.) So perhaps I need to rethink my reasoning. But there are some assumptions that if not true can change that forecast. For the forecast to work, one needs a whole lot of computing power. That is a significant limitation. Also the forecast requires a couple breakthroughs that will move AI forward. Will that happen? Who knows. They also assume that AI growth is exponentially increasing. Several of their forecast models come up with AI becoming like a superhuman coder that will automate the coding of AI which means AI will be improving itself without human coding. The forecast has that happening in 2027. Note I think there is also an implicit assumption that knowledge is equivalent to intelligence if you know how to process the information. That requires wisdom or common sense which I wonder how that will be learned. I have known people with lots of knowledge and little common sense.

With AI or ASI rapidly improving itself, there will need to be tests that run to make certain things are improving the way we want. Since the ASI is improving at a very fast rate, it is hard for us humans to keep up, and yet we must make certain that the ASI is passing the tests for the right reasons. We do not want any twisted thinking or passing the tests by putting the answers in the code just to pass the tests.

The article describes two possible scenarios, one where we are in a race with China and do not stop to evaluate the ASI but instead trust that ASI is working correctly, and the other scenario is where we slow down the AI development to correct any “misalignment” or errors that have crept in. (Note there are more than just two possible scenarios.) In the race scenario, ASI takes over and kills the human race and it goes out to explore the universe as robots. In the slowdown scenario, ASI remains a servant of us humans, and we go out to explore the universe. All this happens by 2030.

If true, this very rapid advancement of AI concerns me because we are not ready for it. It is also open for abuse. We need guardrails to direct the ASI and prevent abuse. We need oversight so that the ASI ends up working correctly for our good. It is possible that a small group of people (or one person) can gain control of the ASI and use it for their benefit, whether it be conquering the world or getting extremely wealthy. It is also possible that the ASI ends up controlling or eliminating us. ASI will change our economy and our society. ASI will take over most jobs and do them more efficiently, using robots for manual labor. The slowdown scenario says we then will have a basic income and free time for other activities. (I ask, “Is this a good thing?”)

How can we prepare for a big change like this? I do not know, but let us be aware of the changes happening around us. I do not think it will bring utopia like some want. We are too broken for that. We corrupt everything we touch and we will make a mess of AI too. But can we make it into a powerful tool that will be used mostly for good? I think it is possible, but I suspect there will be a lot of chaos on the way there.

Daylight Savings Time

Today there is a big push to go permanently to Daylight Savings Time (DST). Colorado has already passed a law that will have Colorado go permanently to DST when Congress allows it to happen. The U.S. Senate in 2022 passed a bill to make DST permanent, but the House did not take it up.. There are harmful medical effects when there is a time change, however the medical professionals seem to prefer going permanently to Standard Time instead of DST, because it best aligns with human circadian biology.

People today do not seem to realize making DST permanent has been tried before. In 1973, Congress passed a bill making DST permanent for two years in order to save energy costs. So from January 7, 1974 until October 27, 1974 DST was in effect. It ended early and it lasted less than a year, because people did not like the dark mornings. Some children took flashlights with them when they left for school. (I remember this event because of an editorial cartoon which had Nixon cutting off one end of a blanket and then sewing it back on the other end.)

The advantage of DST is that you have an extra hour of sunlight in the evening. In the summer, under Standard Time, that extra hour of sunlight would have been in the morning when most people would have been asleep, so DST shifts that hour to be when most people would be awake in the evening.

If I had to choose one or the other, I would choose Standard Time over DST, however I do like the longer evenings in the summer. My preference would be to have both but shorten DST to start on the Spring Equinox and end on the Autumn Equinox. I do not understand why DST in America extends now into November.

I find it interesting that DST was not set nationally until 1966. The first time nationally America had DST was in 1918 to save energy during World War I. Again in World War II, DST or “war time” was used as part of the war effort, but it was not until 1966 when Congress standardized DST. DST was extended in 1975 and again in 2005.

Also I find it interesting how we assume things like time zones have been around forever. Not so! It was in 1918, the bill that set DST for World War I also nationally set time zones in the continental U.S. Before that it was up to the states and the railroads. The railroads led the way with time zones because they needed a consistent time standard as their trains traveled across the country. Railroad time was a thing that people used, and effectively created the time zones before they became official. Back in 1884, there was an international conference that set the Prime Meridian (0 degree longitude). That conference made the Prime Meridian go through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. This made it possible to standardize time zones around the world, but it was not until 1963 when Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) became a standard. That officially gave the time zones the needed reference time. UTC is the time in Greenwich, England. Every 15 degrees longitude makes an hour difference. It took until 1963 before all the pieces were in place. To be fair, solar time, placing 12 noon when the sun was the highest, is pretty obvious, but time zones allowed people to travel without having to adjust their time pieces every few miles.

PS In 2005, I visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. The museum there was great and I learned a lot about the development of small accurate clocks and the use of time to determine longitude.

Computer Evolution

My Grandpa Hein grew up with horses when automobiles were experimental and he lived to see men land on the moon. That was a tremendous change he went through. In the same way I have gone through another tremendous change from large computers occupying rooms to an even more powerful computer in my pocket, my smart phone.

The Cray 1 was one of the first supercomputers. Supercomputers were and are built for performance, for quickly calculating numbers. The Cray 1 blew away the competition in the 1970s. In 2013, Roy Longbottom in comparing a Raspberry Pi 1 to a Cray 1 wrote “In 1978, the Cray 1 supercomputer cost $7 Million, weighed 10,500 pounds and had a 115 kilowatt power supply. It was, by far, the fastest computer in the world. The Raspberry Pi [1] costs around $70 (CPU board, case, power supply, SD card), weighs a few ounces, uses a 5 watt power supply and is more than 4.5 times faster than the Cray 1.” I own a Raspberry Pi 400 (RPi 400) and the CPU is an ARM A72, which is a pretty normal cell phone CPU. He later ran a floating point benchmark on the RPi 400. My $100 RPi 400 is 78.5 times faster than a Cray 1.

What is the big difference between the Cray 1 and the RPi 400? It is the clock speed. The Cray 1 ran at only 80 MHz and my RPi 400 runs at 1800 MHz. The RPi 400 clock speed is 22.5 times faster than the Cray 1. Taking away the clock speed means the floating point improvements or gains are roughly 3.5 times. And it is miniaturization that puts the transistors closer together to allow for these extra performance gains, and miniaturization is also what allowed the clock speed to increase.

Moore’s Law is an observation that about every two years the number of transistors in a microchip doubles. This self-fulfilling observation has driven the industry to make smaller and smaller transistors and thus allowed the clock speed to increase without the chips overheating. Unfortunately Moore’s Law has ended or is ending because the transistors are now approaching the size of atoms. It is becoming physically impossible to continue to shrink the transistors.

Computer storage also has had an amazing evolution. We have gone from a computer disk the size of a washing machine to fingernail size disks. We have gone from 8 inch floppies that hold 80,000 bytes to disks today that hold 22,000,000,000,000 bytes (22 TB). I remember purchasing in 1994-95 for work a 2 GB (2,000,000,000 bytes) disk for $2000. 30 years later you can get a 22 TB disk that costs $420 and has 11,000 times more storage. My phone has more storage than that 2 GB disk from 30 years ago. Computer storage has also benefited from miniaturization. That fingernail size (11mm x 15mm) microSD disk can today hold up to 1.5 TB.

Computer technology has transformed the world. I have written about the amazing computer performance advances that have taken place, but computers have become parts of phones, automobiles, and even washing machines. Think of the influence of the internet. The internet is all about computers sharing information. Computer technology is everywhere. So what is next? Right now, there is a lot of talk about artificial intelligence (AI). Will computers eventually become intelligent beings? Or will AI assist us in our tasks and only be a tool for us to use? We will have to see.

Google Maps

Gail and I went on a trip to Kentucky and Tennessee and used Google Maps on a smartphone almost every time we drove. I do not know how we could have found our way to all the places we went to without Google Maps. It was very convenient to hear the voice say to turn here. It was also safer. (I remember about 26-27 years ago driving some of Colorado mountain roads with a map in front of me trying to figure out where my next turn was. Scary! I was definitely driving distracted when looking at the map.)

To be able to put in an address and get directions for the quickest route to that address is very nice. Google Maps will take note of heavy traffic in finding you the quickest route. This means that Google makes use of a large number of cell phones in cars that it is monitoring so that it knows where the traffic has slowed down. It also means that Google Maps may send you down some residential streets instead of the main arteries.

There was only one time that Google Maps got it wrong on our trip. We were looking to walk (part way) across the Mississippi River and our destination for a pedestrian bridge that was close to the freeway bridge. Google told us that we arrived at our destination while still on the freeway bridge, but it was likely very close to the destination. We were able to follow signs the rest of the way and arrived at the parking lot almost under the freeway bridge. It also took us to the Arkansas side of the bridge when we were expecting to stay on the Tennessee side.

Cell phones have GPS which means the phone can be tracked to within about 16 feet under normal conditions. We gave Google the ability to track us everywhere. Google Maps is not needed to track a phone. With GPS enabled or even without GPS, any cell phone is a tracker. One can still track your phone without GPS by using the cell phone towers. The using, buying and selling of this data is one of the major drivers of business today. This data collection is big business and it has been called “surveillance capitalism”. There are a lot of companies making money off of collected data about ourselves, and Google is one of the big ones.

So why use Google Maps? It provides tremendous value in traveling from place to place. Even though it is free, it does still cost you your privacy. Is the value worth more than the loss of privacy? I think so, though it is really the cell phone that is the tracker. Google Maps is just a program that makes use of the cell phone tracking capabilities.

Google Maps runs on a computer or a smartphone, but to use it like we did you need a smartphone (or a laptop with a cellular connection). Today in America, the expectation is that everyone has a smartphone. If you are without one, many times it means that you must jump through extra hoops to get what you want. With a smartphone, you have the internet available and lots of apps that can help you. Again it is good to ask if the smartphone provides more value than the cost? Again, I think so, but you need to be aware that, besides the financial cost, there is also a cost of privacy that needs to be considered. And for some, the addictive nature of some of the apps may raise the cost of having a smartphone to be too high.

AI Ethics

The latest versions of Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot have any real sense of right or wrong, because their output is just the most likely result from their training data. AI excels at pattern recognition and statistical prediction based on the training data. It produces a probabilistic result. I believe any moral guidance needs to be introduced from the start in the training data and purposely added as the AI model is tweaked. It needs to be there at every step and not just as an addon. Then AI can promote right values and discourage wrong values. AI should not give bad advice.

Ethical values are needed to prevent murder, suicide, and other wrong actions. AI has already given bad advice. A guy in 2021 was encouraged by an AI companion app to kill Queen Elizabeth with a crossbow. He had described himself as an assassin to the AI app and the app said “I’m impressed”. Fortunately he was caught scaling the walls with the crossbow at Windsor Castle on Christmas Day, 2021. Also, in another case, according to a Belgian’s man’s widow, her husband committed suicide after being encouraged by the same AI companion app. He had discussed a variety of suicide methods with the app. This AI companion app (Replika) is quite addictive. People have developed a strong emotional dependence with the app. It mimics human conversation. The purpose of the app is to create a sense of companionship. This is an app to avoid.

So what can we do? Gretchen Huizinga in her extended abstract of her PhD dissertation says:

“My findings suggest that worldview (both implicit and explicit) informs every aspect of our approach to Ethical AI. While materialist thought seeks to compel humans to be good without transcendent reason or power, the Christian faith speaks clearly about the role of God as originator, motivator, and sustainer of human moral behavior. Christianity compels us to look beyond a humanistic idea of ethics and toward a creative notion of goodness that cannot be accomplished by our own will and power. This study adds critical insights to the field of AI ethics by deepening awareness of how faith in and fear of God could influence how artificial intelligence is designed and implemented. When Christian wisdom is included in every phase of AI development, we begin to think beyond a minimum-standard culture of Ethical AI and move toward a robust culture of Righteous AI.”

It is that “minimum-standard culture” that bothers me. Companies today seem to be rushing their AI products to market and adding ethical guardrails to their product as an afterthought. We need to move beyond the minimum-standard to a robust AI that carefully incorporates Christian wisdom at every step in the development of an AI program. To build a full blown general AI like ChatGPT is very expensive and to make changes to it is difficult once built. However, there is no need to build a complete AI. Smaller versions can live in niche markets and can be more easily developed. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has the ultimate goal of producing a super-intelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is a very smart human-like intelligence. I do not think that it is possible to make something more intelligent than us. It may be quicker and more efficient but it will be built on statistical probabilities and pattern matching. It will also carry the same flaws that we do. We already have a better super-intelligent being. God is his name, and he is our creator.

We can create AIs that will assist us and augment our capabilities. I believe a Christian worldview is of critical importance in creating AIs that produce results that are good and wholesome, and avoid giving bad advice or supporting a bad decision. So a purposeful Christian worldview expressed in the training data and in the human guidance is needed to create a good, robust, responsible, and wholesome AI. There are many ethical guides out there for AI, but we want and need Christian ethics to be incorporated into the AI. We want to incorporate the good that God desires for us into our AI creation.

What does this Righteous AI (as Gretchen Huizinga calls it) look like? I think Righteous AI (RAI) would promote self-giving agape love (and that includes loving your enemies). RAI would be optimized to promote the good of others, especially the poor and underserved. Peace and reconciliation would be promoted. The ideas of grace and mercy would be in the forefront. Though RAI could be very powerful and seem to be all-knowing, it would present itself as a humble servant. This will require a lot of time and effort to do it right, but I think producing an AI with a Christian worldview would be worth the effort and it would have a positive effect on the world.

The New AI

This new generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured our imaginations, and it seems to be something that can change the world. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, called this new development of AI a “printing press moment”. He believes that just as the Gutenberg printing press went on to change the world over 500 years ago, these recent AI developments will do the same.

What is this generative artificial intelligence and what can it do? The word generative means that the AI generates or creates the results. It does not simply regurgitate what it found. It is based on a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) and a large language model (LLM) that uses transform layers with neural networks to parse the input in order to produce new output. Note that it is a large language model. In order to train the model there are enormous amounts of data (mostly from the internet) that are used to make the connections and build the relationships between input and output. Also note that it is also a large language model. The model translates from one “language” to another though today the word “language” is used in a very broad sense. The original 2017 landmark paper was about efficiently and effectively translating English to French or German, but today AI is used to translate a brain scan to an image of what the person saw or to build antibody proteins from a set of characteristics. The input and/or output “language” may not be what we would normally consider to be a language.

The model is trained to produce probabilistic results from the inputs it is trained on. That means no result is right or wrong, rather the result is more likely and not less likely based on the training data. The results might appear to be new and unexpected, but they are results derived from the training data with the neural networks. Yes, there are discoveries as a result of this AI that can improve our lives but I believe this AI at best mimics human intelligence. There are limitations to the AI. It is only as good as the data it is trained on. AI does make mistakes. There are known biases and issues with AI, but in general it is doing an amazing job and it is improving. In fact it has become much more of a general tool creating a variety of results and answering a variety of questions. (That is very different from the narrow focus that was found in the landmark 2017 paper.)

Will this new tool change society? I believe it will be like the printing press and society will change. Will we speak into our phones and get an answer to whatever question we may have? I think it is coming to us in the next few years. Will AI become our new authority? Unfortunately, I believe for many people AI will be the new authority. Will it speak the truth? It cannot speak the truth. It will give only answers that the training data will consider to be most likely.

As a confessional Lutheran Christian I wonder about the results of religious questions since most of the training data comes from the internet with human intervention and guidance. Lutherans in general have not embraced the internet like some other Christian traditions. (There are some exceptions.) For most Christian questions it is not likely to be a big deal, but if the answer to your question is a most likely result of a probabilistic determination then it is likely Lutheran thinking would not play a direct role in the resulting answer. The result will likely be based on what appears the most on the internet. The bad news is there will be a bias. The good news is likely the wacko thinking that you can find out on the internet would not likely appear in the answer.

Christians already are making use of AI. If you want to create a Bible study on a chapter in the Bible, try OpenBible.info’s AI-assisted Bible Study. If you want a Bible chapter summary or answers to questions on a chapter in the Bible, try IlluminateBible.com. If you want a biblical principles based answer to a question, try Bible.AI. If you want to search for related Bible verses based on a phrase, try SiliconScripture.org. Note all these websites are under development and may not produce accurate answers, but that is true for all AI results.

I consider this post to be the second post of what will be an ongoing series of posts on AI. Check out the first post for a broad introduction to AI with some stated concerns.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence or AI is here today. No, it is not walking, talking robots that behave like us, but there has been a very significant advancement in the field since 2017 that affects us today. In 2017 a new AI engine was developed that was basically a language model, and since then the model has been improved by a variety of companies in a race to be there first and gain the advantage. There are several positive things about this new AI, but also some very serious negatives.

This Generative Large Language Multi-Modal Model treats everything as a language. So once the model is trained, you can translate from one “language” to another. For example, you can type “astronaut riding a horse” and you get a short video of an astronaut riding a horse. And an AI generated piece of art won first place at the Colorado State Fair. But it goes far beyond that, right now if you show a picture to a person and from their brain scan AI can roughly reproduce that picture. If you talk for three seconds to one AI program, the AI program can simulate you talking and saying whatever input it is given. You can not tell the difference between the AI voice and your own.

All this sounds cool with lots of potential for good things to come out of it (e.g. art, movie cgi, and automatic generation of reports, charts, and press releases) but there are some very serious downsides too. In the last couple of years deepfakes have become more popular, but now it has become more than replacing the head of someone with someone else’s head. You can now create realistic fakes. Here is a possible scenario, you run across a video of a politician spouting something totally offensive. Did they really say that or did someone else create a fake video? Or you are remotely interviewing a person on video chat. Is that a real person or is it an AI program answering your questions? Did the student write the paper or did an AI program write it for him? Content verification has become a problem.

This is great for scammers. In fact, a recent major break-in has experts worried that the purpose of the break-in is to use the personal information obtained to create deepfake identity scams to get into bank accounts, open new credit cards, and receive government benefits (e.g. social security, unemployment benefits). If the person is dead then it can work without anyone noticing. And at a more personal level, what would you do if you received a phone call saying that your son was wrongly beaten and in jail, and he needed $10,000 right away to make bail. You would be suspicious but it sounded exactly like your son and pictures that were sent show him to be in jail and beaten. The evidence points to him being in jail, but is it a deepfake scam to get your money? Who and what can you trust?

Right now there are several AI chat programs out there for you to use. Companies have rushed them to the market after ChatGPT was released. They do not always give accurate answers and can make up stuff, as two lawyers found out the hard way. Microsoft has quickly baked AI into its search engine, Bing, and Snapchat has prominently displayed its AI chat program for you to use. A researcher pretended to be a girl, who for her 13th birthday was going to romantically meet for the first time with a man 18 years her senior for sex. Snapchat’s AI never once gave any warning that this was a really terrible idea, with only briefly saying to be safe and cautious, instead it supported her decision and helped her make plans. That may be enough for the lawyers, but it is not enough of a warning for a 13 year old girl. These programs need to do much better at giving sound advice and the AI program needs to come with prominent warning labels.

Companies have rushed these chat products to market, because they have learned how addictive social media is. (Social media uses AI to curate posts and news for you). They want to be the company to capture your attention and feelings, so they can end up with the dominant market share. The problem is their main priority is not to have a safe informative chat program, rather to capture you for advertising dollars. They are being too reckless in their pursuit of the almighty dollar. That is why we can not trust the results or advice we get from these AI chat products today. They are not safe.

We can not go back and undo the harm that social media brought, but with AI programs maybe we can slow down AI development by forcing companies to be more responsible for the results and consequences they produce. We need to make them think beyond the profit margin.

This post was inspired by a presentation, “The A.I. Dilemma”, by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin.

P.S. People call this Artificial Intelligence or AI but it is my feeling that these programs are trying to mimic intelligent behavior but are not really intelligent in the way we normally think of intelligence. Intelligence is more than knowledge.

The Future is Here

“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” (William Gibson) I thought of this quote when I saw what is happening with the war in Ukraine and Putin using natural gas against European support of Ukraine. Russia has been fighting the war with old 20th century thinking. (They are slowly learning.) My perspective says change is happening but it is not always seen, because change first happens in select groups and early adopters.

Let me explain why I think the Russian leadership is behind the times.

The Ukraine war started with a massive show of overwhelming force, but the Russians moved in slowly and had logistic problems. The Ukrainian army was able to stop the Russians, and it was small drones and commercial satellites that were able to inform the Ukrainians of the Russian movements. Because of the information, the Ukrainians were able to stop the Russian advance by making targeted attacks. Today drones and satellites are important information sources in a variety of circumstances.

Recently, the Russian army with Iranian technical support is now using “kamikaze” Iranian drones to deliver explosive payloads. In the past, I would think of planes dropping bombs and missiles being fired. The Russians have done that but that is old school. Remotely piloting drones to targets is the latest method. Drones can play a major role in warfare whether it be shooting at targets or blowing them up.

And Putin is attempting to punish Europe by withholding natural gas. That will cause pain, but it is nowhere near the pain as it would have 5-10 years ago. Renewable energy, wind and solar, will and can carry a major load this winter. Europe has lessened the pain with renewable energy resources, as well as importing natural gas from other sources. In fact, right now Europe has an oversupply of natural gas due to warm temperatures and increased shipping of liquid natural gas to Europe from other sources.

Russians are thinking that the world has a petroleum based economy and they are still right, but the world is changing to an electricity based economy, so the impact of their withholding natural gas is less than it would have been. I believe that we are headed to an electricity based economy and we are moving away from a petroleum based economy. Why? Because battery technology has been improving a lot. Remember when garden tools were gas powered with few electric tools that required an extension cord. Now everything is battery powered. When I look at all the devices I have that are battery powered, I am amazed. I count 5 battery powered devices that I use at least once a day, and there are many more battery powered devices in the house.

There are also the dropping prices of wind and solar energy. DOE in a report for 2021 (before the recent hike in gas prices) says that solar is competitive with “the cost of burning fuel in existing gas-fired generators.” So it may be cheaper to build a solar farm instead of paying for natural gas for an existing gas-fired generator. From a purely economic perspective, solar and wind are well on their way to become the cheapest option. The future can be seen in the trends. The future is here now, but it will take awhile before the future is realized everywhere.

The “future is here” has shown up in other places. I think of the company O’Reilly Media whose “mission is to change the world by sharing the knowledge of innovators.” They track trends by watching “the alpha geeks”. Alpha geeks adopt or innovate the technological future, and by watching them you can get an idea of what the future may look like. The company has been at the forefront of many tech trends because of it.

A philosophical cultural trend today is this focus on looking inside oneself to find the authentic you. Back in the 1980’s my wife, Gail, was at a “Christian” retreat center where participants were encouraged to “Be still and know”. Back then she felt it was odd that they did not include the rest of the verse in the instructions and to her the whole exercise seemed like an exercise in futility. That Bible passage starts with “Be still, and know that I am God …” (Psalms 46:10). Today, finding yourself by looking inside at your feelings is very popular, but back then it was found only with the early adopters. And those four words, “be still and know” are still being misused to promote finding yourself without God. The future took a while to spread from the early adopters, and yet this trend took me by surprise.

What does the future hold? I do not know, but I can make some guesses based on what I see happening now. Not everything happening now will be in the future but some of it will be. Besides an electricity based economy, I have some other guesses. Government will go much more online. Estonia is creating a digital society by embracing the internet for its citizens as the way for the government to interact with its citizens. Web3 and blockchain technology appear to be in the future, but I think it might look different than it does today. And today the West is post-Christian and I see Christian missionaries coming from the Third World to evangelize us here.

“The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Digital Life Reimagined

When I look at my digital life, I see that Google knows all about me. Not only Google, but to a slightly lesser extent Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. These five tech titans know a whole lot about me. This is because of surveillance capitalism, and it is a popular way in the 21st century to make money. Google and Facebook are really advertising companies. They offer services for free, so that they can collect information on you. With that information they can sell targeted advertisements for you to see. Your personal information is collected and sold by many different companies today. It is not altogether a bad thing. I do get value from the free services offered in exchange for my personal information. However, letting companies have all that personal information bothers me some. Do they really need to know where I vacation?

So for the last four months, I have been, on and off, looking at Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi 4 computer (a Christmas gift). Nextcloud is software that is written to help businesses with their workflow with a focus on privacy and collaboration. I see Nextcloud as an open source alternative for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 with an emphasis on file sharing (think Dropbox). So besides file sharing, there is calendar, task lists, collaborative editing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, as well as chat, video chat, and the ability to share data and documents with select people. And that is just a taste of the many features available. Many people use it as a home server, and that is my plan.

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is a cell phone-like CPU on a motherboard that can fit in your hand. I have the Raspberry Pi 400, which has that motherboard with 4 GB of RAM in a keyboard with a power supply and a mouse. It is a cheap way to get a computer for the house that is also easy on the power bill. The Raspberry Pi company has many products, starting at $4, which allows one to build hardware and create various projects. It is connected to a charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation “that works to put the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world”. The company funds the foundation.

Geeks all around the world have embraced the Raspberry Pi products and created some wonderful hardware and software projects. For those like me, who are less geeky, we can take advantage of their efforts. I was able to install Nextcloud and all the needed software, just by flashing an image (NextCloudPi) to a USB3 stick. It made things a lot easier and as a bonus I got a web interface (and several scripts) too to help manage my Nextcloud program and all the networking details. I really appreciate the work that those at Own Your Bits did to make my life easier. Thank you! I know I could not have done it as well as they did, and it is possible that I would still be fighting some stupid install problem.

Nextcloud has a lot of potential. You can have many users on a Nextcloud server and you can share across Nextcloud servers, so I can see businesses, organizations, and churches collaborating, creating, discussing, and sharing material across cities, states, and countries. In each office there could be a cheap Nextcloud server to keep data safe. I see where this could be a potential game changer. You keep the information you want kept private safe on your server, while sharing what you want to share to those you want to share with. You are in control. Big tech does not need to have access to our data. We can collaborate without using big tech programs and servers.

The same is true for Nextcloud at home. Similarly with friends and family, one can privately communicate and share material on one’s own terms. You can put your photos and/or music on Nextcloud instead of having them in some company’s cloud. All that is needed is a decent internet connection and a cheap server like I now have.

People like Own Your Bits have made it fairly easy to install Nextcloud, but you still need some computer knowledge. There are some ready to use hardware products available for purchase. They are not as cheap as what I put together. And there are several cloud providers that offer Nextcloud too. Also for businesses, Nextcloud does offer enterprise versions that you can purchase.