Kim Gordon's Presentation

Wednesday’s guest speaker was Kim Gordon, director of academic services at Lindenwood. Along with a group interested parties, he has researched the affect that technology has and will have on humanity. The basic premise for his presentation revolved around one “fact” he had on his presentation, “at the current pace of acceleration, we will witness the equivalent of 20,000 years of innovation within the next 100.” Technological advances throughout the world have changed several aspect of the human race: culture, society, beliefs, health, longevity, population, and infant mortality. There is no question that technology has affected these areas and will continue to do so as we advance. Civilizations began about 30,000 years ago with an early death rate of around 25 years old and one child per 20-25 would survive birth. When the last ice age ended roughly 15,000 years ago, the world-wide population was around 450,000 and the average death rate was around 25-30 years old. 6,000 years ago marked the beginning of civilizations with the invention of the plow—humanity no longer needed to wander the earth where the food went, now they could settle and learn to farm an area of land. Moving ahead to the year 1800, the world’s population his 1 billion, the average life-span was 50-60 years old, and only 1 out of 4 babies died. Finally, the present numbers show that the world’s population is around 6.5 billion, the average life-span is 75-85 years old, and 1 out of 20 babies die. Obviously, there is a trend with respect to how technology improves the lives of humanity with innovations in areas such as health and medicine to increase the life-expectancy of individuals. To show how fast technology accelerates, he quoted Moore’s Law which states that the computing power of a PC doubles every 18 months. There’s no doubt that technology is accelerating as fast of even faster than it’s developed. He went on to postulate that by 2020, a computer will have the same processing speed as a human brain. If this is true, I personally see no problem with that. Society is impatient and needs information to be delivered at an almost instantaneous rate. At this point in his presentation, this is where things became somewhat controversial. He stated that he believes due to this acceleration in technology and some of the advances we could be able to make in the fields listed above, it could lead to one of four scenarios: extinction, terminator, Luddite, or singularity. The extinction theory is obvious—the complete destruction of life on Earth. The terminator theory holds that technology will produce machines which will, in turn, enslave or attempt to destroy the human race. The Luddite theory believes that sect of individuals around the world will attempt to sabotage technological advances in hopes of preventing the extinction or terminator theories. Finally, the singularity movement believes that technological advances will cause humans to become more than human. In short, he explained that this theory believes technology will enhance the human mind, body, and other areas to a point that the being no longer can be thought of as a separate entity of self, but rather more machine than human. As students of the media, we should be able be better understand and filter the information that comes our way, and I believe it’s very important that we analyze that information. We can’t live in today’s world and not at least have a basic understanding of technological advances or understand why a certain person is making a specific statement—is it to curry favor towards his side? This is a question that can only be answered by being well-informed enough to make that judgment. Personally, I believe this presentation was simply a great opportunity to scare a lot of people into learning more about what he has to say—if they want to, more power to them; however, I found parts of his presentation to be offensive, indoctrinating, and no place for a classroom. If he has a desire to push his views and his research, then do so in an environment where individuals will have the choice to listen to his “theories” and not where they are required to be there and take notes to complete an assignment.