The 507 Effect

Humanity and Technology promise many marvels. The power lying dormant at our fingertips is enough to power the world forever, or destroy it in a nuclear fission. The technological promises of tomorrow are even more wondrous and amazing. it seems that humanity, after billions of years of evolution, has reached a break point. A point at which using the powers of its own mind, and the resources of its own planet, we will finally create tools allowing us to leave behind our primitive and violent past, and have abundance for all creation. Already the tech exists for all humans to have electricity and clean water. Already there are enough junk computers and cell phones for everyone on earth to be connected. But the divide is in the profit motive. I understand that people who develop new paradigms want to be compensated. Even more so paradigms that are God-Like. But never before has humanity truly had the opportunity to feed and cloth everyone. Never before has humanity had the chance to make everyone healthy. Never before have we had the chance to explore and colonize the galaxy. This window may be closing rapidly. An oil based society is doomed to collapse. Currently we have an economic and cultural engine unheard of before in history. We are on the launchpad, poised for a Grand Horizon. But already the barbarians are looming on the borders. Already the inmates run the asylum.
Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.* The poorest 40 percent of the world’s population accounts for 5 percent of global income. The richest 20 percent accounts for three-quarters of world income.* Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.* The stats are alarming because we are reaching a point of intelligence explosion. As the gap between poor, uneducated people and enhanced intelligence grows wider, can we trust that there will not be some type of enslavement? Can we trust that smaller more powerful technologies and weapons won’t be used in a host of ways against humanity and our culture?
If we navigate this narrow course, and prevent the train from derailing, humanity may be entering a phase where intelligence truly “flowers”, and we come into the great promise that we seem so capable of. There appear to be no other signs of our form of intelligence in the observable Universe, meaning that either we are very very special, or that all societies that reach our level of development destroy themselves, and so we are also destined. How we navigate this course will depend on each and every human. No one can be left out or behind. It the profit motive continues, then people will be left out, and there will be two classes. Those enhanced and those not enhanced. Enhanced humans already exist. If you have a cell phone, use the internet, own a gun. You are enhanced by technology. It is all a matter of degree. If the profit motive disappears, then there is enough for everyone. All of earths resources will be directed at uplifting our minds, and harvesting the best ideas of the world so that we don’t miss this crucial window in time. Everyone on earth will be provided for easily, and instead of the haves and the have nots, there will only be The Haves and The Have Mores.

*Thanks to GlobalIssues.org for the facts.