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The Cybernetic Revolution and the Forthcoming Epoch of Self-Regulating Systems

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The Cybernetic Revolution and the Forthcoming Epoch of Self-Regulating Systems The International Center for Education and Social and Humanitarian Studies Volgograd Center for Social Research Leonid Grinin and Anton Grinin The Cybernetic Revolution and the Forthcoming Epoch of Self-Regulating Systems Moscow 2016 ББК 30г 60.5 63 Leonid Grinin and Anton Grinin The Cybernetic Revolution and the Forthcoming Epoch of Self-Regulating Systems. Moscow: Moscow branch of Uchitel Publishing House, 2016. – 216 pp. ISBN 978-5-7057-4877-8 The monograph presents the ideas about the main changes that occurred in the devel- opment of technologies from the emergence of Homo sapiens till present time and outlines the prospects of their development in the next 30–60 years and in some respect until the end of the twenty-first century. What determines the transition of a society from one level of development to another? One of the most fundamental causes is the global technological transformations. Among all major technological breakthroughs in history the most important are three production revolutions: 1) the Agrarian Revolution; 2) the Industrial Revolution; and 3) the Cybernet- ic one. The book introduces the theory of production revolutions which is a new valuable explanatory paradigm that analyzes causes and trends of dramatic shifts in historical pro- cess. The authors describe the course of technological transformations in history and demonstrate a possible application of the theory to explain the present and forthcoming technological changes. They analyze the technological shifts which took place in the sec- ond half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and forecast the main shifts in the next half a century. On this basis the authors present a detailed analysis of the latest pro- duction revolution which is denoted as ‘Сybernetic’. They make some predictions about its development in the nearest five decades and up to the end of the twenty-first century and show that the development of various self-regulating systems will be the main trend of this revolution. The authors argue that the transition to the starting final phase of the Cybernet- ic Revolution (in the 2030–2040s) will first occur in the field of medicine (in some its in- novative branches). In future we will deal with the started convergence of innovative tech- nologies which will form the system of MANBRIC-technologies (i.e. the technological paradigm based on medicine, additive, nano- and bio- technologies, robotics, IT and cogni- tive technologies). The monograph gives an outline of the future breakthroughs in medi- cine and some other technologies (between the 2010s and 2070s). This research has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation (Project № 14-11-00634). ISBN 978-5-7057-4877-8 © Uchitel Publishing House, 2016 Contents Introduction. Between Human and Post-Human Revolutions or What Future is Awaiting Us? . 5 Chapter 1. Global Technological Transformations: Theory and History . 15 Chapter 2. The Characteristics and the Logic of the Cybernetic Revolution. MANBRIC-Technologies . 41 Chapter 3. Medicine in the Cybernetic Revolution: Medicine and Medical Technologies as a Breakthrough to Control Over Human Body . 61 Chapter 4. Biotechnologies within the Cybernetic Revolution: Biotechnologies and Creation of Self-Regulating Systems 87 Chapter 5. Nanotechnologies as the Way to Mastering the Microworld 103 Chapter 6. Robotics and Other Technologies in the Cybernetic Revolution . 116 Afterword. Threats and Risks of the Future World of Self-Regulating Systems . 134 Appendix 1. Some Issues in the Theory of Historical Process . 146 Appendix 2. Mathematical Interpretation of Historical Process . 151 Appendix 3. The Sixth Kondratieff Wave and the Cybernetic Revolution . 163 References . 173 About the Authors . 215 4 Оглавление Introduction Between Human and Post-Human Revolutions or What Future is Awaiting Us? In the modern world an individual deals with different technologies and products of scientific and technological progress and becomes more and more dependent on them, spending considerable time to understand changes and to keep up with progress. In general, the entire human history especially in the last few centuries is the history of victories and triumph of science, tech- nology, and information technologies. Moreover, the humankind being a fa- ther of technology at the same time became more and more dependent on it. Today technologies penetrate almost every aspect of our life: private, fami- ly and intimate, as well as our mentality. But even more serious transfor- mations are awaiting us in the future when devices and technologies are in- troduced into the human body and consciousness thus putting strain on all our biological (nervous, physical, and intellectual) adaptive capacities. To- day they give a serious thought to seemingly strange ideas about whether mobile phones, computers, and organizers can become a part of our body and brain. In fact, technology has become one of the most powerful forces of development. The changes occurring within the society are very often caused by technological transformations. That is why the issues of technological de- velopment appeal to our contemporaries. So it is extremely important to re- veal some regularity in the history of technological development, and make an effort to anticipate at least the coming transformations in technologies and in the society. But, unfortunately, there are quite a few researches which in a systemic and consistent way describe the technological devel- opment and can explain in scientific terms why and how the technological revolutions occur. Besides, there are also quite a few works that present a consistent forecast of technological development proceeding from the dis- covered developmental trends. Our study is devoted to the history of development of engineering and technology, to the analysis of their current state and reflections about their fu- ture. In this book we pay attention to the main technological revolutions in 6 Introduction the history of human society, both to those already completed and to the fu- ture ones, as well as to the transformations in society and consciousness they have already brought and will cause in the future. In the 1950s and 1960s the world (first of all, the developed countries) witnessed the largest technological revolution which continues until the present. At the end of the twentieth century the achievements of this revolu- tion especially in the field of information technologies have become widely spread in the most countries of the world. This revolution is variously termed (scientific-technological, information, etc.). However, we denote this revolution as the Cybernetic Revolution since cybernetics is the science about information and its transformations in the process of regulating vari- ous complex systems. The current revolution has dramatically changed the information processing as well as promoted a breakthrough in the regula- tion of complex processes in a wide range of natural and artificial systems that have become a part of production process (and in the future it is likely to trigger such a breakthrough to the full scale by creating an essentially new environment, i.e. a world of self-regulating systems). The Cybernetic Revolution is the third largest production revolution in the history of humankind following the Agrarian (Neolithic) and Industrial ones; yet, it has not finished yet. In this volume we discuss the revolution- ary changes which the world will face in the coming six–seven decades within the ongoing Cybernetic Revolution. The coming phase of the Cyber- netic Revolution will change the quality of our life by enhancing the impact on human body. There will also appear technologies that will allow differ- ent systems to function in a necessary regime without direct human inter- vention (i.e. these systems will become autonomous and self-regulated). The capability to maintain the given parameters in self-supporting (auton- omous, self-regulated) regime will involve the control of production and in- formation that has already become possible in various spheres during the decades of the Cybernetic Revolution, as well as control of a number of technological, social, natural, and especially biological processes (as well as in the human body). Earlier they used to connect the emergence of Homo sapiens with new technologies (arguing that labour transformed apes into humans, while the labour implied first of all the ‘production’ of stone tools). Now it is clear that it was the result of a range of reasons which changed human genetics, though the material factors (such as the way of life and natural environment) also enormously contributed to this process. The transition to Homo sapiens is termed the Human revolution (e.g., Mellars and Stringer 1989), yet we would better denote it as Proto-production revolution with account of its im- Between Human and Post-Human Revolutions 7 pact on the society since it triggered quite a rapid development of technology proper (what is more, technology developed in different spheres including also the primitive painting). Today we are at the threshold of the Post-human revolution. Perhaps, it will be less dramatic than the transhumanists and other adherents of practi- cal immortality imagine it in a wish to part with the biological body. But anyway we are speaking about considerable extension of life, increasingly common replacement of organs and cells of the human body with non- biological materials, introducing of electronic and other (nano-, etc.) ele- ments into
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