In my last blog post I mentioned about how Covid-19 took the whole world by storm: a major lockdown/shutdown of human activities all around the world. This phenomenon has put several question marks on advancing technologies developed/invented during the last couple of decades. Futurists have earlier painted a very rosy picture of human society on account of the exponential benefits/returns of novel advancing technologies, especially at micro level (or quantum level). The law of accelerating returns takes into account the predictions of Moore’s law which suggests that devices would become smaller and smaller in size as a result of novel technological developments/inventions and ultimately the process would end up at some singularity. All these things look great and several such technologies have given great comforts to human society. But the futurists forgot the fact that many laws of invisible quantum world may not be known and they should have taken this fact into consideration while making predictions of exponential returns as a result of new advancing technologies in future. Now Nature has brought out this fact before human beings. The invasion of the disastrous Covid -19 on Earth! A threat to human life!

 

The recent outbreak of Covid-19 has shown the opposite side of the coin which till now was not so visible.  Instead of exponential returns the whole world is witnessing exponential or rather peak losses. Almost the whole world is under lockdown, human activities are all grounded and a climate of great fear has been generated. Where are the exponential returns of new advancing technologies? Or have we reached some sort of singularity that we are unable to handle the consequences of technologies? I think our quest for winning over Nature by working for developing new technologies through manipulations in the invisible quantum world has shown us the other side of the coin: we will be rewarded with tremendous losses too while working on technologies involving the quantum world, though the objective was to get exponential returns!

 

Where are those technologies which were yielding exponential returns and giving hope to win over everything in the form of exponential returns? If the Law of Accelerating Returns holds in isolation then we should have discovered/invented technologies to find a cure for Covid – 19 by now (it is almost six months Covid -19 started infecting humans). In the past pandemics it took years to find a medicine or vaccine for infectious diseases. But if we were blessed with accelerating returns exponentially (as the law says) due to novel advancing micro-technologies, especially in genetics and medical science, it would have been easy for human beings to find some cure by now and majority of fatalities would have been avoided. But we have found no weapons so far to fight the disease and it has proved that technologies at micro level (or to say scientifically at quantum level) have not given any exponential returns so far even after several decades of research. On the contrary it has been shown that in this domain of quantum world the law of accelerating losses would become operative through Nature as human understanding of this world is limited and shall always remain limited – a fact which human beings and especially, all researchers must realize.

 

The Covid-19 incident has shown that human beings must not invade into this micro-world with a desire to win over Nature. This world is invisible to us, its laws are unknown to a large extent (and will never be deciphered due to natural limitations). Therefore the message from Nature to human beings is:

Develop/invent technologies for the benefit of human beings and stop experimenting with atoms/molecules/quantum particles with goals to win over Nature. Otherwise let us be prepared to face the fury of Nature as we are facing now. Choice is ours!  Returns and Losses would go together and we have to learn to optimize the process (and our research goals) with the objectives of looking for only those technologies where direct losses to human life are at minimum, or even better if there are none.