www.IntegralLife.com For full description and free download, please visit: http://integrallife.com/editorial/humanity-i-and-great-google-sky "Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself. The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself." Teilhard de Chardin Wave upon wave of technological innovation are now crashing upon the shores of history—robotics, astronomy, interplanetary exploration, nanotechnology, optical computing, quantum computing, the Large Hadron Collider, and even the faintest hints of clean energy. Technologies like these are already having a wide-reaching effect upon the world, enhancing and augmenting our humanity in powerful ways, shaping our experiences, our relationships, and our understanding of the universe. Others, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, stem cell therapy, nootropics, and genetic engineering—technologies like these do not merely enhance our humanity, they force us to discover what it means to be "human" in the first place. What was once the job of mystics, artists, and renegade philosophers has now been thrust into the spotlight of mainstream science, and the human race is given a unique opportunity, never before possible. We have the opportunity to consciously define ourselves for the very first time, to release ourselves from the bondage of habit, superstition, myth, materialism, and nihilism that have imprisoned our collective identity since the birth of man, and to pull every aspect of culture, experience, and history together into a single coherent vision of humanity. The role of technology in this reconstruction of human identity is profound. On the one hand, technology helps us understand the human condition with much more clarity and resolution than every before possible—exponentially increasing our shared body of knowledge, exposing previously secluded cultures to the light of the 21st century, offering an extraordinary vantage of the full parade of human experience. Our technology has expanded human intelligence in ways that we could have never dreamed just decades ago, and is accelerating every day. And yet, for every major triumph of intelligence our technology has enabled, many of our conceptions of human intelligence are being slowly stripped away as A.I. learns to outperform humans at tasks we once thought only humans could do. Technology is not just enhancing our humanity; it is negating it as well—and together we spiral toward the worlds first collective species-wide identity crisis. In order to even begin to make sense of this, we must take a truly comprehensive approach to the human condition, one that is able to pull all of our perspectives, all of our worldviews, and all of our methodologies together into a single coherent "theory of everything." This is the integrative impulse, an unquenchable drive to make sense of the full complexity of life, the universe, and everything, without ever leaving anything out—to find a way to integrate science, technology, spirituality, sexuality, psychology, ecology, business, politics, art, etc., into a single vision of humanity, without ever forgetting how much about the world and about ourselves we have yet to discover. About Kevin Kelly: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He helped launch Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor until January 1999. He is currently editor and publisher of the Cool Tools website, which gets 1 million visitors per month. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. He authored the best-selling New Rules for the New Economy and the classic book on decentralized emergent systems, Out of Control. About Ken Wilber: Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the "everything" books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work). Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc. and the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc. For full description and free download, please visit: http://integrallife.com/editorial/humanity-i-and-great-google-sky

• published: 09 Feb 2009
• views: 2096