Deus ex Machine - Digital Universe

Prologue Human progress has been unprecedented for the last couple od decades and it's not going away. Quite contrary - over the course of the next 20 years, more will change around the way we do our work and create than has happened in the last 2,000. Now, when we take a look at history of mankind, we can focus on a perspective defined by the way we work that consists of four major historical eras. We can say that humans have lived in hunter-gather age for a few million years. Then, as tools progressed, agricultural age has followed for several thousand years, until the industrial age in 18th century began. It lasted for (quite literally) a couple of centuries followed by recent information age that only lasted a few decades leading us to today, which is on the verge of augmented age. What does this mean? Well, in this new era, our natural human capabilities are going to be augmented by computational systems that can help us think, robotic systems that help you make, and a digital nervous system that connects you to the world far beyond your natural senses. One could actually argue that we're already augmented. Imagine you're having a drink, and somebody asks you a question that you don't know the answer to. If you have your phone, in a few seconds, you can know the answer. But this is just a beginning. Even more advanced systems of today like Siri are just a passive tool. In fact, for the last three-and-a-half million years, the tools that we've had have been completely passive. They do exactly what we tell them and nothing more. Our very first tool only cut where we struck it. The chisel only carves where the artist points it. And even our most advanced tools do nothing without our explicit direction. We've always been limited by this need to manually push our wills into our tools - like, manual, literally using our hands, even with computers. But let's talk Iron Man's Jarvis here.