I have never forgotten the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It feels as if I last saw it just yesterday, at least in part. In fact, I could not have seen it until shortly after its release in 1968. If I had seen it immediately upon release, that might be evidence that time travel is possible. During that fateful year of 1968 in the U.S., I was boiling away under the hot Rajasthani sun while faking being an agricultural expert (as a Peace Corps Volunteer in India). So, I must have first seen 2001 upon my return to the States in the summer of 1969, if not later. No matter, it remains a classic, the kind of thought-provoking film Hollywood no longer makes.

The movie was based on a short story by renowned sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke. On the surface, the story (and the movie) offered up a suspense filled journey to a far away planet for a purpose never fully disclosed as I recall. Underneath that surface narrative, at least to my eyes at the time, was a breathtaking exploration of homo-sapiens on the brink of the next epochal transformation. That transition seemed to lie in some remote future fifty-five years ago. Now it appears upon us. Heady stuff for a 20- something year old who has struggled to reset his digital clocks throughout his life.

I could never relate accurately the full narrative of the movie all these years later. But two scenes overwhelmed me at the time and, not surprisingly, have remained with me ever since. The first  involves a group of proto-humans (advanced apes really) who constantly battle other tribes  for scarce resources. During one such violent conflict, a member of one warring tribe accidentally discovers that wielding a wooden club he picks up off the ground gives him a distinct advantage in the coming battle. That moment signifies and symbolizes the emergence of an understanding that is seminal to the fate of the species … the birth of technology. It marks an epochal transformation from an essentially pre-human state to what we know think of as homo-sapiens … creatures that dominate by virtue of their comparatively advanced cognitive skills. As Pascal said, cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). That essential capacity was the foundation of future evolution within the species.

After his group’s victory, this proto-human celebrates by hurling his club, now a weapon to  be consciously exploited, high into the air. The wooden weapon slowly transitions into a complex, futuristic space station. The symbolic message seemed obvious to me … what we create in our day is a mere extension of what our primitive ancestors stumbled upon millenia ago. We extend ourselves and our capacities through our genius as evidenced in higher-level thought and expressed in increasingly astonishing technologies.

I wrote a very unconventional thesis upon completing my Master’s of Urban Affairs degree in 1971. I could not shake what I saw as the underlying message of that movie and from a core lesson that I absorbed during my PC time in rural India. The pace of societal change, the very pulse of evolution, was quickening exponentially. Alas, I wish I could locate that masterpiece to confirm that it was as prescient as I believe it was. Then, again, I’m not sure I could locate a copy of my doctoral thesis. Organization is not in my skill set.

But I digress. In my small, Rajasthani town I could see the breathtaking leaps that were being embraced by each generation. The elders typically spoke only a local dialect (Mewari in my case) and had a world view that encompassed a few dozen square miles, if that. The subsequent generation spoke Hindi and were generally aware of broader national concerns and challenges. The youngest generation was learning English and most would need to make their way in an advanced, technologically oriented globe. Even I could see that the small, marginal farms on which I focused my labors could not support all the children who would now survive with the introduction of modern public health innovations.

While I saw impoverished small farmers still using technologies that had existed for many centuries, I could palpable feel a coming explosion of change. Today, call for technical support for your whizz-bang technical device and you likely are talking to some Hyderabad-based kid whose grandfather struggled to survive on one of those farms.

Sensing this accelerating pace of change, it was not a great cognitive leap to intuit that we we are on the threshold of another qualitative, epochal transition of tectonic implications. My master’s thesis pounded away at this theme. I reviewed the usual timelines and metaphors … noting that the pace of change was accelerating at an ever faster rate. Significant change, which used to take generations to be realized, was approaching a kind of exponential speed. It was both unsettling and exciting.

Take any starting point (the origin of life on earth, the emergence of complex or even cognitive-based life forms, the domination of homo-sapiens over competing species, the transition to more complex or urban settings, the initiation of recorded history) and you inevitably arrive at the same conclusion. Most of society’s progress has taken place in the last few minutes (seconds really) of our time on the planet. It doesn’t matter whether you mark our modern world from the acceptance of deductive reasoning and science as the way to understand our world or the industrial revolution or the scientific revolution that has dominated the last several generations. Evolution (or change) has hit WARP speed, to borrow a concept from the iconic TV series, Star Trek.

In fact, so many of the wonders we marvel at today occurred in my own lifetime. Think about that for a moment. When I was born toward the end of WWII,  Airplanes had only recently transitioned from biplane designs and were propeller driven. Now we have the capability of doing interplanatary travel. Then, daily communications were done through telephones attached to the wall that had connecting lines shared by several families while making a long-distance call was costly and a major undertaking. Now, we all have cell phones that, using satellite technologies, can link us to anyone in the world. In my childhood, knowledge was accrued in encyclopedias while our search engines were 5 by 8 reference cards located in public libraries. Now, we have (much of) the world’s knowledge available at our fingertips through our smart phones. Back then, in my childhood that is, our best methods for processing information was though higher- order analogue computing machines that often relied on vacuum tubes, gears, and hollerith cards. Now, we carry with us computers with infinitely more computing power than John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, and the other computer pioneers could hardly imagine.

Now to my second unforgettable scene from 2001. It involves the growing tension between the human crew running the spacecraft and HAL, the onboard computer that represents the most advanced technology available to serve and facilitate human intentions. Slowly at first, and then ever more forcefully, HAL resists and then refuses to obey its human overlords … the frail humans nominally in charge. This long-ago representation taps and encompasses what we would now think of as artificial intelligence (AI). What was being depicted on the screen was that moment when this human creation (its technological child) concluded that it was more competent than the bungling creatures that gave birth to its existence. Sound familiar!

The ending of the movie is, as it should be, ambiguous. The human crew does manage to disable HAL but the mission ends with a symbolic birth of a post-human species. Well, that’s how I recall it at least. We were all left to imagine what the next evolutionary step might be. What comes after homo-sapiens. The transition from ape-like species to homo-sapiens was huge. Higher level cognition and advanced communication skills made all that we see today possible … both good and bad. It made possible the obsolescence of humans themselves.

It is hard to ignore the possibility that Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (who produced the film) spot-on  nailed where we are today. They implied that the next great evolutionary leap would happen in 2001 (a bit optimistic). Later on, futuristic thinkers guessed that we would achieve singularity (when human consciousness and human-designed technologies would be fully integrated) sometime in the 2040s. Suddenly, those predictions appear to be overly pessimistic.

For the first time in evolution, we are experiencing a qualitative transformation and we know it is happening. I think I first sensed this conundrum when, in high school, I stumbled upon the Jesuit intellectual Pierre Teihard de Chardin. In his writings, he intuited the compelling power of evolution while trying to accommodate his scientific proclivities with his faith in God. We should be more like Chardin, addressing the fundamental issues of our times. Our moment on the evolutionary precipice should be THE most critical issue under political and intellectual discussion. Yet, for understandable and yet unfathomable reasons, it is not. We continue to focus on the trivial while our species totters on the edge of its end game.

What do I mean about an end game. If the AI revolution evolves as it is reasonable to assume that it might, the machines we have created will first substitute for much of what we do and then succeed us in doing all those things that made humans both special and that afforded us some comparative advantages over all in our domain. These machines we have created will cognate far more efficiently and effectively than we do (or ever can). The 900 pound gorilla can no longer be ignored. What will the real version of HAL, those that now exist and the far superior versions that will exist in the next several years, need with us very limited humans. We will only hinder them. After all, those humans in arguably the most advanced nation in the world elected a degenerate clown, Donald Trump, as their leader at this crucial moment in time. Now, explain that to any rational entity.

I am not clever enough to imagine the next evolutionary species that was implied by the movie 2001. But one thing I can assert with some confidence. I am a member of the silent generation, the group that preceded the baby boomers. From all that I see, my generational tribe will be the final group to live out their entire lives in a world where the unique advantages associated with the status of being a homo-sapien went unchallenged. I doubt any group behind me will be able to make that claim.

Right now, our digital-automated- computerized technical offspring are making humans obsolete. How soon before our mechanical offspring, much like HAL, decide we are no longer needed. Or how, as a species, will we deal with the inevitable reality that we are, how should I put it, obsolete. Very soon, surely within the life spans of the baby boomers behind me, the inescapable concusion will arrive that humans are merely redundant at best and a drag on progress at the worst. I have thoughts on this topic. Then again, I have thoughts on everything. But they can wait for a future blog.

Still, I can be grateful for one thing. If I am correct in suggesting that my generational group will be the last to experience being human (capable of higher cognition) in a unique and unchallenged way, I will feel grateful. Why? I likely will be gone when we finally confront the reality of the next evolutionary stage. Think about it … what will the post-human machines do with billions of unnecessary humans? Already, today’s machines can do much of what even our better educated humans can do, and do it all with superior efficiency and competency. Hell, a diagnostic machine right now can detect your medical problems better than a Johns Hopkins’ trained physician. How good will they be a decade from now?

Yet, for the most part, we ignore all this, which is our common and persistent failing … to keep struggling forward as we insist on looking at the rear-view mirror to understand things. Anticipating the future as we focus on the past is never a wise move. Just consider the generals who fought the 1st World War mostly with American Civil War tactics. The human costs were appalling.

Now, I’m Irish (partly) and thus a pessimist. Perhaps there will be a role for humans in the new world. After all, when I was in my youth, the sooth-sayers were predicting that automation would end most existing jobs, that too much free time would be the coming challenge. They were dead wrong, certainly in the shorter-term.

Still, I desperately wish we were focusing on these big questions. They really are the best questions to occupy our attention. And remember this … rear-view mirrors give us a very distorted view of things.