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Jason Silva Cannes Lions PHD

Futurist Jason Silva: 'We have decommissioned natural selection' with technology

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

June 17, 2014 | 3 min read

Jason Silva, unique techno philosopher and futurist, has claimed technology will augment the next steps of mankind’s future.

Rebooting the audience credit:Jackmorton

Speaking at Cannes Lions, Silva said technology evolves exponentially and that it will evolve with humanity: “If you take 30 steps you get to thirty, that’s normal that’s intuitive. That is not how technology evolves. It evolves exponentially. To take 30 steps exponentially by step 30, you are at a billion.

“That is why the smart phone in your pocket is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller and a thousand times more powerful than what used to be a $60m super computer, half a building in size, 40 years ago. What used to just fit in a building, now fits in a pocket.”

Technology will decrease in size and increase in power over the next 25 years: “[It will be] the size of a blood cell, interfacing directly with your biological neurons, reverse engineering us from the inside out and amplifying our intelligence to unfathomable levels. It is insane.”

He commented that a young child in Africa with a smartphone will have a more powerful communication network than the president of the United States of America 25 years ago.

Technology helps us “subjugate limitations, that’s the human story," Silva said. "We are the species that didn't stay in the caves, hasn't stayed on the planet and in the future won’t even stay within the limitations of biology.

“The physicist Freeman Dyson talks about a near future where a new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency with which Blake and Byron wrote verses… try to imagine that, biology becoming the new canvas for our genius artistry, what will we make? We have decommissioned natural selection.”

When faced with the danger of technology Silva added: “When we discovered fire we could cook food with it, or burn ourselves. It had the positives and the negatives. We have to probe at the perimeters of the possible.”

Below is the trailer for the seminar.

Jason Silva Cannes Lions PHD

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