Conscious Universe - The Third Epoch

The Universe has an overarching flow, a through line, to evolve towards ever greater complexity, structure and order.

To understand this cosmic flow and the utter significance, it is necessary to go all the way back to the Big Bang, the birth of the Universe.

This is the story told by science, of the Universe, evolving from nothingness to consciousness. It’s the story of the three Great Epochs: Physical Universe, Living Universe and Conscious Universe.

We start this journey at the beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, the moment before the big bang, when there was no Universe, no stars, atoms, or particles, no light - nothing.

Then, suddenly, the threshold of the big bang was crossed, with it, the release of an expanding primordial field, which gave birth to the first Great Epoch, Physical Universe.

From energy, to quarks, to atoms, to stars, the Physical Universe grew increasingly complex, structured and orderly. A repeating pattern of incomprehensible dimension – a Universe filled with billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, all following the same fundamental laws of physics.

As the Universe continued to unfold, within the nuclear furnaces of stars, most of the nearly 100 naturally occurring elements of chemistry were formed – oxygen, iron, carbon, nitrogen, and so on.

Exploding giant stars, supernovas spread these elements throughout the Universe, much of it, coalescing into an inconceivable number of planets.

Each planet, a unique experiment in chemistry. These elements, through pressure, heat, radiation and friction, were mixed in a near infinity of ways, forming countless new minerals, compounds and molecules – and yes, further increasing the complexity, structure and order of the Physical Universe.

On one such planet, Earth, the only one we know of so far, conditions were right for organic chemistry to give birth to the second Great Epoch, Living Universe, Life - entirely distinct from the Physical Universe from which it came.

The basis of life, biological evolution, happens through an extraordinary strategy; life making copies of itself, almost perfectly, occasionally with mutations, giving rise to the genus of natural selection - producing the spectacular diversity of life on Earth.

Biological life powerfully exhibits the characteristic of continually increasing complexity, structure and function. And wow, did it do this, evolving all the way from invisible microbial life into us, highly social, conscious and collaborative homo sapiens, the humans.

Modern humans came equipped with two sets of extraordinary traits.

The first set of traits delivers growth of human knowledge and know-how, seemingly without limit thanks to our very large brains combined with our highly refined vocal physiology. Together, these two traits advantaged humans with: the capability of infinite mental abstractions, reasoned thinking and complex collaboration as well as enabling storytelling, song, advanced social systems and shared accumulative learning.

Our second set of traits empowers us to alter the Earth in an infinity of intentional ways thanks to our upright posture and dexterous fingers, advantaged humans by: liberating our arms from locomotion and making possible unlimited environmental manipulations.

When taken together, these two sets of distinctively human traits created the framework to progress from a few thousand nomadic hunter-gatherers to an interconnected, vastly diverse, exotically technical, global culture of 7+ billion people.

The original energy of the Big Bang, now with eyes wide open, with the ability to consciously manipulate and modify energy, matter and even the building blocks of biological life itself, DNA.

Indeed, we are star stuff contemplating star stuff, we are the Universe getting to know itself, consciously.

This lead us back to the pivotal point in the 21st century when humans realize that the Universe is attempting to hand-off to Humankind the third Great Epoch, Conscious Universe.

Twenty-first century mega-game-changing technologies illuminate the pathway into Conscious Universe.

Hyper-accelerating technologies like, artificial intelligence, automation and genetic-engineering are advancing exponentially, and they are also converging.

These mega-game-changers, will, in short order, have a profound impact on how we live, work and play.

Even more-so, these technologies are the tools humans will use to progress, consciously, as Agents of Evolution: genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and automation:

1.      Genetic -– Hacking Life

Humankind is at an inflection point, where humans acquire the ability to alter life, create new forms of life and even design new species. The implication cannot be overstated and must be taken into super serious consideration.

Natural selection has handed off to Humankind the ability to consciously manipulate DNA – the code of life. This is a profoundly unique position that we all now share; not only as stewards of our societies and planet, but also stewards of evolution. 

As we navigate this new frontier, fundamental to our success is the overarching quality of the foundation we lay through consciousness, culture and technology. It is paramount that the underlying foundation is morally and ethically sound – business as usual will absolutely not cut it!

2.      Artificial Intelligence – Cognitive Augmentation

Intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Until very recently, the only intelligence that we knew of, that was ever created on our planet was from nature, through natural selection. This ranges from narrowly focused intelligence like in ants, to more general intelligence such as in mammals and primates to very conscious high-level intelligence found exclusively in humans.

Humans have hacked intelligence by developing a new kind of non-conscious narrowly focused intelligence we refer to as Artificial Intelligence. Remember before this all intelligence came only through the magic of natural selection.

Humans are unraveling and manipulating the building blocks of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through techniques such as, self-learning algorithms, multi-layered neural networks and deep learning.

Deep learning represents a radical break from the past. It uses artificial neural networks to mimic the fundamental design of intelligence, the neurology of the human brain. This technique allows deep learning algorithms to become progressively better at what they do.

These algorithms literally self-learn to translate languages in real time, recognize faces, read radiology images, improve energy efficiencies, predict behavior, detect early onset of cancer, the list goes on with virtually no limit to what they can learn and do.

If we are to thrive in the future where rapidly advancing AI infiltrates all aspects of our lives, it is extremely crucial to proceed consciously, collectively, and strategically – guided by a higher moral compass.  

3.      Automation – From Work to Well-being

AI, self-learning algorithms, high-precision robotics, Natural Language Processing, 3D printing and self-driving everything are all accelerating exponentially and converging; producing rapid and extraordinary advancements in automation.

Unlike anything we’ve seen in the past, over the next 5 - 10 years, the number of jobs lost to a Second, much larger Wave of automation, will be staggering – the disruption on labor and society, extreme.

AI powered robots are now talking to us, conversationally, using very natural speech, they already see, hear and smell better than we do. Their strength, dexterity and locomotion will soon far outmatch ours. They learn from doing and learn from each other.

As NY Times, bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “The most important question in the 21st century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?”

It’s not a matter of if this is going to happen, rather, it’s a matter of how we prepare and adjust to a world that becomes rapidly more intelligent, offers greatly enhanced production capacity and requires way less labor.

There is a growing group of thought leaders, across a broad spectrum, who believes we have an option to embrace automation in innovative ways that generate very positive results for all of us.

Imagine, all or most of the mundane and repetitive jobs being done by robots and many white-collar jobs being replaced by AI. What if this automation was powered by renewable energy, utilizing super-efficient production processes, where virtually nothing is wasted? The result, significant increases in sustainable production capacity, generating considerably more wealth.

Could we not re-design our society to take full advantage of these technology-generated gains to better serve the greater good?

Well of course we can! Envision how a greater sharing of this wealth could facilitate a transition from work to well-being - allowing all of us to follow our passions, whatever they might be: organic farming, art, entrepreneurship, caring for others or restoration of nature.

This is a time that is fundamentally different from any other time in our human journey – profoundly so – an uncharted new frontier.

We are about to experience the greatest release of compressed change since, perhaps, the birth of the universe, the Big Bang. Humans as potential Agents of Evolution!

What once seemed like science fiction, is about to change the very nature of what it means to be human.

It is absolutely imperative that Humankind now rises to this unparalleled occasion: individually, collectively and globally.

We stand before the most critical and consequential crossroad in our human journey.

Our greatest challenge is how do we navigate this extraordinary 21st century inflection point. Will we make choices that are harmonious with becoming Agents of Evolution, or will we fumble fail?