Mankind is undergoing a profound change in its mode of existence. We cannot avoid the fact that new inventions in the fields of information and technology are introduced on almost a daily basis.
Undoubtedly, the IT revolution has given mankind a lot of positive things. Take into account how the speed of information processing has contributed to heartening results in the field of medicine, leading to mitigating lots of human suffering from various diseases.
In the fields of agriculture and husbandry, people in the developed world have managed to get rid of the pessimistic predictions of Robert Malthus (An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1826) to a considerable extent.
The speed of inventions inherent in the information technology revolution indicate that a revolution taking place without precedence in the history of mankind, which carries a promise of a myriad surprises yet to come that we best be prepared for.
Archie Bahm claimed that mankind had made use of the brain far below its maximum capacity (Comparative Philosophy. Western, Indian and Chinese Philosophy Compared, 1977), and that the current human capacity to digest, realize and respond to an influx of information was far below its real speed.
One executive proudly told a meeting that he had received more than 150 email messages in a day. We may quietly wonder whether he could read them all, let alone respond to each one responsibly.
Speed is one factor. The fast volume of information is another, providing an immense challenge to the human capacity to deal with and make use of the huge amounts of information we are faced with.
Ancient Greek philosophers such as Protagoras and Democritus understood that human beings were limited in their capacity to grasp reality in all of its complexity.
Reality reifies itself for the human mind in the form of information.
So there will always be a great part of information available that will flow past the human mind without notice.
Complexity is the third factor inherent in information of the IT Age with which humans should deal with.
Some people will be capable of dealing with and making use of a greater range of increasingly complex information and its increasingly complex processing.
By the same token there will be other people who will remain isolated from the IT Age, much less make use of the advantages it provides.
The cybernetic combination of high speed, fast volume and immense complexity of information made available by techno-science of the IT Age would provide mankind with a new form of meta-natural selection of the human species, still along Darwinian rules.
Human beings have dynamics, however, which are curtailed by its spatial and temporal perspectives that cannot help to be always related and bound to history, to which information is an independent realm with its own dynamics.
While human beings are prone to change, information being increasingly becoming a decisive substance of reality prevails over a dynamic that is independent from any historical perspective.
Therefore, only those who are fit enough to deal with the challenge of the complex information paradigm will survive this info-natural selection paradigm.
By then, history will proceed along the same avenue of time as it did one century or one millennium ago.
There have always been more modern civilizations existing on this one planet in isolated tribes with pre-modern ways of life.
In the future, however, the debate over justice will have become more heated, and never will the problem of injustice become more critical than in the IT Age.
It is very likely such debates over justice will be conducted hypocritically, while leaving natural selection to work its ways surely but silently, and without mercy.
Despite hyper post-modern civilizations, mankind will remain part of nature and thereby subject to
its perpetual rules.
Therefore, competition will remain part of human existence with all its plausible consequences.
There will be a stage in history where mankind will find it increasingly difficult to get along and deal with its own creation: Techno-science. People in developed countries have already experienced this in the late 20th century as preemptively described by Erich Fromm in the 1940s (Escape From Freedom, [1941] 1971).
Human beings became confronted with the need to “protect himself not only against the danger of losing his life but also against the danger of losing his mind.” (The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology, 1968).
To overcome alienation by technology, Fromm proposes that human beings liberated themselves from the burden of their own creation by developing a sane society to be achieved by a mentality that is “serious and dedicated” towards creating “harmony between the individual human nature and the social order” (The Sane Society, [1955] 1973). Fromm’s ideas, however, have unfortunately been ignored by the majority of mankind.
Indeed, because of its unique implications, the IT revolution would define mankind in another dimension. The next life world subject to the IT revolution would not only harbor one mankind but several man-kinds, the classification of which would depend on their respective capacities to cope with and draw advantages from the IT Age produced by the IT revolution.
While we oppose the law of the strong prevailing among humans, that law has always been the rule of the history of mankind, which seems to always have been a history of the elites (Gaetano Mosca: The Ruling Class, 1923). Only visionary elites with humane intentions can change it.
The writer is a professor at the School of Philosophy, Parahyangan Catholic University, Bandung.
