I am here today as the “Wondering Futurist”, crowdsourcing foresight about the Future of Text. Based upon my own foresight studies, I see the beginning of the end of text, as we know it, already in the works.
I watch my grandchildren playing the latest online games with such speed and dexterity that I have never before witnessed. I see Google, Facebook, UTube, Slack, Skype, eBooks, League of Legends, World of Warcraft and countless more digital message streams as the new norm, now crowding out the world of dinosauric text. Yes, there will always be a place for classic text – whatever that might mean to you.
In terms of the real-world communications and messaging volume, the classic direct person-to-person transfer of messages is fast disappearing. Machine-intelligence now increasingly serves as intercessor to curate messages between persons in order to bridge their personal contextual mindsets.
We have already witnessed Apple, Google and Facebook rise to global status … becoming unstoppable developers of our collective future, as I shall elucidate further. Currently, here is where our fantastic future is being built. It’s a fact that within just 3 years, over half of the world’s adults already use a Smartphone.
The Smartphone’s embedded Artificial-Intelligence-driven software fuels humankind’s fastest evolutionary paradigm-shift in history. We have already reached the point of no return as human-intelligence and machine-intelligence have begun their irreversible symbiogenesis, creating a new hybrid extra-intelligent-species that I like to call the “Avatar”. I think of the Avatar, not as the person, but as the person’s interface with the external world.
As humankind completes its rapid transhuman-to-posthuman evolution, messaging will primarily travel from Person A to Avatar A then to Avatar B and finally to Person B. During that routine transfer of data and information, the message content becomes recomposed into a variety of representations by both Avatars supporting their human users’ needs.
Those recompositions, occurring at nearly the speed-of-light, will include adding new and existing content, human-avatar negotiated changes, and rapid transformation of the original message into one or more of many alternative forms as needed, such as introductions, abstracts, summaries, conclusions, facets, views, fractals, graphs, outlines, keyword summaries, etc. These components are necessary to successfully complete the message intake, its understanding, and then finally stored as knowledge within each recipient’s Personal Knowledge Ecosystem.
In this state-of-communications, the original text formats disappear, and frankly in my opinion, so does classic text, as we know it. As you will see here today, that while there are many different esoteric views of the “Future of Text”, there can only be ONE FUTURE!
Today, we largely speak of text … as an external entity to our minds. Within the decade we will witness the beginnings of nanobots-augmented-human-intelligence, coupled with direct mind-to-mind communications, replacing natural-humans as the new top-species.
In the following decade we will see machine intelligence begin to match human intelligence and in the decade following that one, machine intelligence will exceed both natural-human-intelligence and nanobots-augmented-human-intelligence, as it becomes the final top-species, capable of acting autonomously within many different shape-shifting forms, and when needed, merge to become a single-global-intelligence.
It’s up to you, to determine which viewpoint is most beneficial to your future planning … and actions. I’ve expressed my¬ future view, and I hope it helps inform your future view.
Stanley Gould (6:00 minute speech)
stanleygould@gmail.com