Superorganism
You can think of caffeine as a civilization-level hormone secreted by the Keurig ducts installed in our homes and offices
The future we’re headed toward is one where Amazon trucks become the red blood cells that use the highway and road networks as veins and capillaries. In your body, the capillaries reach every cell and deliver nutrients. This future is sedentary. You’ll plug into a VR headset and you will pretend that you do not live in a pod.
When a competing country threatens your safety, you put on your headset, see a notification pop up that tells you your country is under attack, it dumps you into an interface that allows you to remotely control an FPV drone, and you defend your country without ever leaving your home.
In the same way that red blood cells don’t reproduce, we might eventually have trans people be the go-betweens. They may literally become the life blood of our society. The more people stay indoors, in their pods, the more we can expect the government to relax restrictions on drug use, and to experiment with new drugs. Many people already consume caffeine between 9 and 5pm. You can think of caffeine as a civilization-level hormone secreted by the Keurig ducts installed in our homes and offices.
Religion, too, plays into this future. When Jesus said his followers are part of his body, it will increasingly make sense to take this literally. The communists in Russia referred to parts of their government as organs. Marxism will have something to contribute. In your own body, all of your cells are cared for. From each, according to their ability, to each according to their need.
In the future, everything gets blurred. Or rather—that’s one interpretation.
No, boundaries become sharp. People form distinct groups. The global network is already installed, and from here on out we start to seriously specialize. We’re no longer stem cells that haven’t found their function. Over the coming decades, we’ll see permanent organs form.
Isn’t nuclear war going to make this too costly? What if someone blows up one of these organs? No, as long as waging nuclear war creates a serious risk of losing enough technological prowess that the ability to make nukes in the future is at risk. You need an industrial society composed of many people coordinated together. If you lose enough people, enough factories, etc, then you will not be able to make more nukes. Even if your country is run by a psychopathic dictator who cares about nukes over human lives, he would have to concede that a handful of Einsteins is not enough to make nukes. You need an entire industrial society.
Suicide is your body’s cells collectively taking the nuclear option. We know what this looks like. We have hotlines you can call. But for the entirety of the human race, there is no physical hotline. We’re alone, and when we feel the self-destructive urge, we need to work up the energy to keep working together.
I bet that the internet and especially Twitter are growing up to be the nervous system of the superorganism.