If telecommunications and geospatial solutions continue along their current trends, human society will soon be communicating with each on such a huge and fast scale, we may as well be thought of as making up still larger minds and beings. Physical location will be irrelevant. We have tribal instincts that cause us to band to together, and combine that with ever increasing communicative abilities, and the tribes just get larger and larger.
The human species has a tribal instinct. We naturally want to congregate and work together to survive. We naturally want to follow a leader, and even the leaders have their own ideas or even figures of their own that they follow. When we put our heads together, we think alike. When we play different tribes off each other, we benefit by learning from their mistakes and gradually broaden our means to grow and interact.
There was a time when long distance calls from Yellowknife to Sydney were nothing more than disembodied voices that were separated by gaps between the speaking, as the information was passed along the globe. Then, those pauses became shorter and vanished altogether. Soon, screens gave those voices faces. If you were in Yellowknife, you could talk to people in Sydney like they were right there in the room!
So of course now the goal is to make such an improvement in communications that people in lots of different settings, besides offices and homes, are able to communicate like they’re in the same room! No longer will it even be necessary to think about where on the physical globe a person is standing. The communication exchange would be so quick, and the spatial data so large, that even on a chairlift in Calgary you’ll be able to relay whole streams to someone in the back alleys of Ottawa. You’re as good as being in the same room.
Of course, this has all come to pass already. But the idea is that as data streams and communication grow, what has already come to pass will become possible on an ever-larger scale. Soon, groups that require no space on the earth as their own, will have become more important than those who do.
Eventually, there will only be so many of these groups left, their inner communications so fast and so efficient, the people among them may very well be thought of as thinking alike. On that scale, they all do. Of course, individuality on a personal scale will be preserved, but as long as the nuances of their thinking are similar enough, their thoughts as they pertain to the group will be the same. Now, the group is another individual, the average of all the people, and those groups will either merge together or drive away each other.
So the physical space itself? It will be the apparatus that support the people who all think (relatively) alike. For all the different of these groups on the Earth, there will be that many sections that will function as the “bodies” of those groups. They will be like their own organisms. Soon, there will be only one group of people left, it’s body all the things we have constructed for ourselves, feeding on the planet.
Telecommunications and geospatial solutions will evolve so much that it will effectively merge the minds of everyone on the planet. Data will be so instant and readily available that it will basically be in everyone’s thoughts at once.
Canadian Corporate provides leading location content and software solutions. Location intelligence includes: address validation, address database, geocoding software, postal code map, neighbourhood maps, address verification software and spatial data.