With the convergence of 4G and 5G networks come the most disruptive technologies, but also comes the risk of a major collision. Let's say that all immersive, intrusive and invasive technologies will, sooner or later, collide with their potential recipients.
What is important to emphasize at this point, at the precise moment when the high speed of the 5G network is about to arrive, is the very high risk of a “major collision due to speeding”.
In fact, the coronavirus shows us that a major collision is imminent between the infinitely large macro-organisms, the human beings that we are, and the infinitely small micro-organisms, as is the case with Covid-19.
This great collision also has an eloquent expression in the divorce that took place between the natural sciences and the social sciences, and few authors were able to establish reliable relations of co-evolution between these two branches of science.
The umbilical link between the natural sciences and the social sciences was broken.
If we think about genetic manipulation, cloning, fertilization techniques and genomic maps, if we think about the relationship between food, health and longevity and the impact of this relationship on the lives of concrete people and on the representation they make of themselves and of life in society, we will be talking about intricate processes of contemporary subjectivation but, above all, about a very different social and political construction, a kind of "new world", where anything can happen, because society and the environment can be converted into a gigantic laboratory.
The NBIC Universe
The industrial revolution of the 1st modernity is behind us, we are now on the way to the “Universo NBIC”, a technological constellation that is on the way to transhumanism and post-humanity.
The NBIC technological constellation, formed by nanotechnologies (N), biotechnologies (B), computer industries (I) and cognitive sciences (C), will have an immense impact on the life sciences and human health, the food industries and the natural world.
With NBIC, we will be citizens permanently connected and watched, wherever we are, regardless of the “non-place” where we are.
However, in this technological vertigo lies an existential doubt, namely: it is very likely that the hyperspeed of technological devices substantially reduces the city-country distance, but, at the same time, contributes to casting a paradoxical look at the most remote territories from the interior, to the extent that digital nomadism and hypermobility prevent the formation of a critical urbanism that allows them to counteract movements towards the coast.
An example of this paradoxical look at the city-country relationship concerns the significant impact that the NBICs have on the so-called precision agriculture and on its ranks or value chains. These are the immersive and intrusive technologies of the city in the countryside.
Here are some examples of precision technologies already used today: remote irrigation management, crop monitoring from aerial images obtained with drones, the surveillance cameras in the stables and cows, the robots of milking and feeding, the chips in the animals to monitor their life cycle, the robots to carry out the work in the vineyard, autonomous vehicles such as agricultural machines and tractors, the sensing of the forest (the eyes and ears of the trees), the thermal cameras (the night eyes of the firemen), the images by drone of the areas with the greatest accumulation of bushes, the robots to make the fire attack, the date and the cloud computing, computational models for the elaboration of intervention scenarios, the creation of smartphone applications for use by farmers and firefighters, finally, artificial intelligence (machine learning) for various simulations.
In the NBIC Universe everything will be smart, sooner or later: the city, the housing, the factory, the hospital, the airport, the university, the automobile, the shopping center, but also the agricultural field, the livestock company, the forest, the natural park, the river basin, etc.
I mean, in the context of the "internet of things" (IOT) and automatic systems, practically nothing will escape monitoring and control devices, whether sensors, chips, drones, robots or surveillance cameras.
If we add the aforementioned technological constellation to this “digital plantation”, we will certainly have an occupation of the territory very different from the current one, with fewer people , and more people ex situ occupied with tasks of surveillance, programming, planning and control, managed at a distance by “augmented beings” who administer all kinds of electronic and digital interfaces.
Here the imagination has no limits and the late Portuguese countryside will certainly be very confused.
The NBIC Universe, Biopolitical Production, the Great Collision
The NBIC universe will be increasingly immersive, invasive and intrusive and everything will be accelerated with the arrival of the 5G network.
In fact, with the digital constellation formed by the convergence of 4G+5G networks, we will be able to witness an inversion of the terms of the technological equation, that is, the NBIC universe will no longer be instrumental and subordinate and will begin to instrumentalize and subordinate nature and humanity, the result being a new, perhaps cruel, way in which man and nature are both “produced”, that is to say, being the result of a special “biopolitics”.
In this sense, the covid-19 pandemic can be read as a kind of warning to navigation, in this trajectory that can take us to the unknown, to transhumanism and post-humanity.
Basically, what the pandemic tells us is that ecology and economy are inseparable and that there is only one land and only one health. It warns us that a major collision is imminent between us, human beings, and the infinitely small of micro-organisms, whether viruses and bacteria, but also technological nano-devices and that this clash will bring us greater and greater damage and more and more victims.
If not, let's see:
– Climate change puts pressure on the migrations of humans, plants and animals,
– Demographic spring in some areas coexists with demographic winter in others,
– The trade and trafficking in people, live animals, common and wild, does not stop,
– The fragility of basic sanitation, water and public health systems is evident,
– Chemically intensive farming puts more pressure on scarce resources,
– A genetically modified agriculture has increased biosafety risks,
– An urbanization made on agricultural land coexists with a miserable suburban environment,
– A growing mobility coexists with intensive and predatory touristification.
These risk factors, in constant motion, visible to the naked eye, are just as many red lines that humans cross all too often, putting the economy and ecology on a trajectory of imminent collision:
– The invasion of living beings' living space increases the number of viral mutations,
– The imbalance between prey and predators also increases the number of mutations,
– The fragmentation of ecosystems and habitats increases the number of viral mutations,
– Trafficking in human beings brings people and viruses from various sources together,
– Local markets in the underdeveloped world are a constant focus of viral load,
– The use of antimicrobials in agricultural creation ends up contaminating humans.
The result is known. Interfaces such as chips, nano-implants and other devices increase the sources of contagion, natural barriers are violated and viruses collide head-on with humans.
Rodents and bats, in particular, become great hosts for zoonoses, changes in the life cycle of microorganisms generate new mutations and, in the end, each pandemic creates its own pathogens.
Final grade
I end as I started. At the precise moment when the high speed of the 5G network is about to arrive, there is a real risk of a “major speed collision”.
In summary:
– The speed of networks and the loads of Big Data are getting bigger,
– The degree of exposure and vulnerability to hackers are getting bigger,
– Earth-space is an increasingly irrelevant distance-space,
– Moral hazard and free raider are getting bigger on this world-stage,
– The electromagnetic cloud is getting bigger and hovers over our heads,
– The side impacts of the networks are increasing,
- The individual who digitizes is increasingly an individual with added value and digitized,
– The human-machine interaction is increasing towards transhumanism.
For the rest, it is good not to forget that other collisions are about to happen in the great 4G+5G constellation: the risks implied by biosecurity, the cyber cold war, piracy and computer viruses, electromagnetic radiation interfering with public and individual health, the rheumatic pains and the viruses of vending machines, not to mention the domestic IOT prison and the future original collisions of autonomous vehicles on our highways littered with 5G antennas. A brave and extraordinary new world.
To follow up in the next chapters.
Author António Covas is a Retired Full Professor at the University of Algarve
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