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Fifty

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Fifty men followed Norman of Torn

The Alali women, fifty strong

The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . The Fifty Frightful Men The Fifty Frightful Men For several long minutes Jane Porter and William Cecil Clayton stood silently looking at the dead body of the beast whose prey they had so narrowly escaped becoming. The girl was the first to speak again after her outbreak of impulsive avowal. “Who could it have been?” she whispered. “God knows!” was the man’s only reply. “If it is a friend, why does he not show himself?” continued Jane. “Wouldn’t it be well to call out to him, and at least thank him?” Mechanically Clayton did her bidding, but there was no response. Jane Porter shuddered. “The mysterious jungle,” she murmured. “The terrible jungle. It renders even the manifestations of friendship terrifying.” “We had best return to the shelter,” said Clayton. “You will be at least a little safer there. I am no protection whatever,” he added bitterly. “Do not say that, William,” she hastened to urge, acutely sorry for the wound her words had caused. “You have done the best you could. You have been noble, and self-sacrificing, and brave. It is no fault of yours that you are not a superman. There is only one other man I have ever known who could have done more than you. My words were ill chosen in the excitement of the reaction—I did not wish to wound you. All that I wish is that we may both understand once and for all that I can never marry you—that such a marriage would be wicked.” “I think I understand,” he replied. “Let us not speak of it again—at least until we are back in civilization.” The next day Thuran was worse. Almost constantly he was in a state of delirium. They could do nothing to relieve him, nor was Clayton over-anxious to attempt anything. On the girl’s account he feared the Russian—in the bottom of his heart he hoped the man would die. The thought that something might befall him that would leave her entirely at the mercy of this beast caused him greater anxiety than the probability that almost certain death awaited her should she be left entirely alone upon the outskirts of the cruel forest. The Englishman had extracted the heavy spear from the body of the lion, so that when he went into the forest to hunt that morning he had a feeling of much greater security than at any time since they had been cast upon the savage shore. The result was that he penetrated farther from the shelter than ever before. To escape as far as possible from the mad ravings of the fever-stricken Russian, Jane Porter had descended from the shelter to the foot of the tree—she dared not venture farther. Here, beside the crude ladder Clayton had constructed for her, she sat looking out to sea, in the always surviving hope that a vessel might be sighted. Her back was toward the jungle, and so she did not see the grasses part, or the savage face that peered from between. Little, bloodshot, close-set eyes scanned her intently, roving from time to time about the open beach for indications of the presence of others than herself. Presently another head appeared, and then another and another. The man in the shelter commenced to rave again, and the heads disappeared as silently and as suddenly as they had come. But soon they were thrust forth once more, as the girl gave no sign of perturbation at the continued wailing of the man above. One by one grotesque forms emerged from the jungle to creep stealthily upon the unsuspecting woman. A faint rustling of the grasses attracted her attention. She turned, and at the sight that confronted her staggered to her feet with a little shriek of fear. Then they closed upon her with a rush. Lifting her bodily in his long, gorilla-like arms, one of the creatures turned and bore her into the jungle. A filthy paw covered her mouth to stifle her screams. Added to the weeks of torture she had already undergone, the shock was more than she could withstand. Shattered nerves collapsed, and she lost consciousness. When she regained her senses she found herself in the thick of the primeval forest. It was night. A huge fire burned brightly in the little clearing in which she lay. About it squatted fifty frightful men. Their heads and faces were covered with matted hair. Their long arms rested upon the bent knees of their short, crooked legs. They were gnawing, like beasts, upon unclean food. A pot boiled upon the edge of the fire, and out of it one of the creatures would occasionally drag a hunk of meat with a sharpened stick. When they discovered that their captive had regained consciousness, a piece of this repulsive stew was tossed to her from the foul hand of a nearby feaster. It rolled close to her side, but she only closed her eyes as a qualm of nausea surged through her. For many days they traveled through the dense forest. The girl, footsore and exhausted, was half dragged, half pushed through the long, hot, tedious days. Occasionally, when she would stumble and fall, she was cuffed and kicked by the nearest of the frightful men. Long before they reached their journey’s end her shoes had been discarded—the soles entirely gone. Her clothes were torn to mere shreds and tatters, and through the pitiful rags her once white and tender skin showed raw and bleeding from contact with the thousand pitiless thorns and brambles through which she had been dragged. The last two days of the journey found her in such utter exhaustion that no amount of kicking and abuse could force her to her poor, bleeding feet. Outraged nature had reached the limit of endurance, and the girl was physically powerless to raise herself even to her knees. As the beasts surrounded her, chattering threateningly the while they goaded her with their cudgels and beat and kicked her with their fists and feet, she lay with closed eyes, praying for the merciful death that she knew alone could give her surcease from suffering; but it did not come, and presently the fifty frightful men realized that their victim was no longer able to walk, and so they picked her up and carried her the balance of the journey. Late one afternoon she saw the ruined walls of a mighty city looming before them, but so weak and sick was she that it inspired not the faintest shadow of interest. Wherever they were bearing her, there could be but one end to her captivity among these fierce half brutes. At last they passed through two great walls and came to the ruined city within. Into a crumbling pile they bore her, and here she was surrounded by hundreds more of the same creatures that had brought her; but among them were females who looked less horrible. At sight of them the first faint hope that she had entertained came to mitigate her misery. But it was short-lived, for the women offered her no sympathy, though, on the other hand, neither did they abuse her. After she had been inspected to the entire satisfaction of the inmates of the building she was borne to a dark chamber in the vaults beneath, and here upon the bare floor she was left, with a metal bowl of water and another of food. For a week she saw only some of the women whose duty it was to bring her food and water. Slowly her strength was returning—soon she would be in fit condition to offer as a sacrifice to The Flaming God. Fortunate indeed it was that she could not know the fate for which she was destined. As Tarzan of the Apes moved slowly through the jungle after casting the spear that saved Clayton and Jane Porter from the fangs of Numa, his mind was filled with all the sorrow that belongs to a freshly opened heart wound. He was glad that he had stayed his hand in time to prevent the consummation of the thing that in the first mad wave of jealous wrath he had contemplated. Only the fraction of a second had stood between Clayton and death at the hands of the ape-man. In the short moment that had elapsed after he had recognized the girl and her companion and the relaxing of the taut muscles that held the poisoned shaft directed at the Englishman’s heart, Tarzan had been swayed by the swift and savage impulses of brute life. He had seen the woman he craved—his woman—his mate—in the arms of another. There had been but one course open to him, according to the fierce jungle code that guided him in this other existence; but just before it had become too late the softer sentiments of his inherent chivalry had risen above the flaming fires of his passion and saved him. A thousand times he gave thanks that they had triumphed before his fingers had released that polished arrow. As he contemplated his return to the Waziri the idea became repugnant. He did not wish to see a human being again. At least he would range alone through the jungle for a time, until the sharp edge of his sorrow had become blunted. Like his fellow beasts, he preferred to suffer in silence and alone. That night he slept again in the amphitheater of the apes, and for several days he hunted from there, returning at night. On the afternoon of the third day he returned early. He had lain stretched upon the soft grass of the circular clearing for but a few moments when he heard far to the south a familiar sound. It was the passing through the jungle of a band of great apes—he could not mistake that. For several minutes he lay listening. They were coming in the direction of the amphitheater. Tarzan arose lazily and stretched himself. His keen ears followed every movement of the advancing tribe. They were upwind, and presently he caught their scent, though he had not needed this added evidence to assure him that he was right. As they came closer to the amphitheater Tarzan of the Apes melted into the branches upon the other side of the arena. There he waited to inspect the newcomers. Nor had he long to wait. Presently a fierce, hairy face appeared among the lower branches opposite him. The cruel little eyes took in the clearing at a glance, then there was a chattered report returned to those behind. Tarzan could hear the words. The scout was telling the other members of the tribe that the coast was clear and that they might enter the amphitheater in safety. First the leader dropped lightly upon the soft carpet of the grassy floor, and then, one by one, nearly a hundred anthropoids followed him. There were the huge adults and several young. A few nursing babes clung close to the shaggy necks of their savage mothers. Tarzan recognized many members of the tribe. It was the same into which he had come as a tiny babe. Many of the adults had been little apes during his boyhood. He had frolicked and played about this very jungle with them during their brief childhood. He wondered if they would remember him—the memory of some apes is not overlong, and two years may be an eternity to them. From the talk which he overheard he learned that they had come to choose a new king—their late chief had fallen a hundred feet beneath a broken limb to an untimely end. Tarzan walked to the end of an overhanging limb in plain view of them. The quick eyes of a female caught sight of him first. With a barking guttural she called the attention of the others. Several huge bulls stood erect to get a better view of the intruder. With bared fangs and bristling necks they advanced slowly toward him, with deep-throated, ominous growls. “Karnath, I am Tarzan of the Apes,” said the ape-man in the vernacular of the tribe. “You remember me. Together we teased Numa when we were still little apes, throwing sticks and nuts at him from the safety of high branches.” The brute he had addressed stopped with a look of half-comprehending, dull wonderment upon his savage face. “And Magor,” continued Tarzan, addressing another, “do you not recall your former king—he who slew the mighty Kerchak? Look at me! Am I not the same Tarzan—mighty hunter—invincible fighter—that you all knew for many seasons?” The apes all crowded forward now, but more in curiosity than threatening. They muttered among themselves for a few moments. “What do you want among us now?” asked Karnath. “Only peace,” answered the ape-man. Again the apes conferred. At length Karnath spoke again. “Come in peace, then, Tarzan of the Apes,” he said. And so Tarzan of the Apes dropped lightly to the turf into the midst of the fierce and hideous horde—he had completed the cycle of evolution, and had returned to be once again a brute among brutes. There were no greetings such as would have taken place among men after a separation of two years. The majority of the apes went on about the little activities that the advent of the ape-man had interrupted, paying no further attention to him than as though he had not been gone from the tribe at all. One or two young bulls who had not been old enough to remember him sidled up on all fours to sniff at him, and one bared his fangs and growled threateningly—he wished to put Tarzan immediately into his proper place. Had Tarzan backed off, growling, the young bull would quite probably have been satisfied, but always after Tarzan’s station among his fellow apes would have been beneath that of the bull which had made him step aside. But Tarzan of the Apes did not back off. Instead, he swung his giant palm with all the force of his mighty muscles, and, catching the young bull alongside the head, sent him sprawling across the turf. The ape was up and at him again in a second, and this time they closed with tearing fingers and rending fangs—or at least that had been the intention of the young bull; but scarcely had they gone down, growling and snapping, than the ape-man’s fingers found the throat of his antagonist. Presently the young bull ceased to struggle, and lay quite still. Then Tarzan released his hold and arose—he did not wish to kill, only to teach the young ape, and others who might be watching, that Tarzan of the Apes was still master. The lesson served its purpose—the young apes kept out of his way, as young apes should when their betters were about, and the old bulls made no attempt to encroach upon his prerogatives. For several days the she-apes with young remained suspicious of him, and when he ventured too near rushed upon him with wide mouths and hideous roars. Then Tarzan discreetly skipped out of harm’s way, for that also is a custom among the apes—only mad bulls will attack a mother. But after a while even they became accustomed to him. He hunted with them as in days gone by, and when they found that his superior reason guided him to the best food sources, and that his cunning rope ensnared toothsome game that they seldom if ever tasted, they came again to look up to him as they had in the past after he had become their king. And so it was that before they left the amphitheater to return to their wanderings they had once more chosen him as their leader. The ape-man felt quite contented with his new lot. He was not happy—that he never could be again, but he was at least as far from everything that might remind him of his past misery as he could be. Long since he had given up every intention of returning to civilization, and now he had decided to see no more his black friends of the Waziri. He had foresworn humanity forever. He had started life an ape—as an ape he would die. He could not, however, erase from his memory the fact that the woman he loved was within a short journey of the stamping-ground of his tribe; nor could he banish the haunting fear that she might be constantly in danger. That she was illy protected he had seen in the brief instant that had witnessed Clayton’s inefficiency. The more Tarzan thought of it, the more keenly his conscience pricked him. Finally he came to loathe himself for permitting his own selfish sorrow and jealousy to stand between Jane Porter and safety. As the days passed the thing preyed more and more upon his mind, and he had about determined to return to the coast and place himself on guard over Jane Porter and Clayton, when news reached him that altered all his plans and sent him dashing madly toward the east in reckless disregard of accident and death. Before Tarzan had returned to the tribe, a certain young bull, not being able to secure a mate from among his own people, had, according to custom, fared forth through the wild jungle, like some knight-errant of old, to win a fair lady from some neighboring community. He had but just returned with his bride, and was narrating his adventures quickly before he should forget them. Among other things he told of seeing a great tribe of strange-looking apes. “They were all hairy-faced bulls but one,” he said, “and that one was a she, lighter in color even than this stranger,” and he chucked a thumb at Tarzan. The ape-man was all attention in an instant. He asked questions as rapidly as the slow-witted anthropoid could answer them. “Were the bulls short, with crooked legs?” “They were.” “Did they wear the skins of Numa and Sheeta about their loins, and carry sticks and knives?” “They did.” “And were there many yellow rings about their arms and legs?” “Yes.” “And the she one—was she small and slender, and very white?” “Yes.” “Did she seem to be one of the tribe, or was she a prisoner?” “They dragged her along—sometimes by an arm—sometimes by the long hair that grew upon her head; and always they kicked and beat her. Oh, but it was great fun to watch them.” “God!” muttered Tarzan. “Where were they when you saw them, and which way were they going?” continued the ape-man. “They were beside the second water back there,” and he pointed to the south. “When they passed me they were going toward the morning, upward along the edge of the water.” “When was this?” asked Tarzan. “Half a moon since.” Without another word the ape-man sprang into the trees and fled like a disembodied spirit eastward in the direction of the forgotten city of Opar. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1993). The Return of Tarzan. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/81/pg81-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .

The Fifty Frightful Men

Fifty Shades of SexTech: How Sexuality Meets Technology

Check out part one and two of this series for the first five and fifty years in AI. In part three we push the very limits of reality and look 500 years into the swirling depths of tomorrow. ########################################### “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.” — Yoda. 2519. Humanity finally burst free of the bonds of that frail blue planet drifting lonely in space. (The ) pale blue dot We’ve spread out towards the stars and colonized the solar system, from settlements orbiting the glittering rings of Saturn, to sprawling cities on the red hills of Mars built by nano insects invisible to the eyes. Massive robotic ships lower their long elephant trunks and slurp helium and precious gases from the depths of Jupiter. When their big bellies are filled to bursting, they rocket along invisible superhighways, delivering He3 to energy hungry fusion micro-reactors that power the interplanetary economy. Beyond the rings, deep space mining ships release clouds of drones like baby spiders into the wind and they digest asteroids hurtling in the endless void. The drones fuel an unprecedented building boom on nearly every planet circling the sun, as city after city goes up on barren rocks long hostile to organic life. The fastest transformations are . The once dead ocean of red dust now seethes with new life. taking place on Mars The people who immigrated to Mars generations ago don’t need oxygen at all. They’re genengineered to breathe the carbon dioxide saturated sky, though their lungs can switch back and forth between oxygen and CO2 as easily as flipping a light switch. (You won’t but you can play the board game!) make it to Mars And the great of Mars moves faster and faster with each passing standard-year. Gigantic , created by the biggest interstellar conglomerate DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) churn the deadly air, slowly making it breathable for oxygen dependent creatures. terraforming atmospheric processors But it’s not just the air that’s changing. Skyscraper sized machines gouge the red soil, ripping it apart to make an ocean, the largest undertaking ever attempted by mankind. “Natural born” Martians resist the cataclysmic forces of terraforming and the radical changes it will bring, fearing that the lush rolling red will give way to seas of green and blue. But no one can deny that the titanic transformation of Mars is the first true Wonder of the space age. And what an age it is. The Anthropocene Era Welcome to the . age of man ( ) The Economist’s great issue: The Age of Man Since we crawled up from the vast primordial ooze and evolved into , we’ve radically changed everything we’ve ever laid our hands on. Homo Sapiens We dammed great rivers and harnessed their tremendous energy with turbines, while carelessly poisoning other rivers with heavy metals and trash. We cultivated a tiny group of plants that nurtured life and served us, while crushing biodiversity and setting off a chain reaction of devastating collapse in others. We domesticated a narrow range of animals we could lead to the slaughter or keep around us because they made us smile, while condemning others to . extinction on an epic scale Now the long tendrils of our influence has spread to the stars. And our influence moves faster than it ever has before. Everything is accelerated. Culture. Economics. Technology development. Evolution moves at stomach churning speed. Entire boom-to-bust cycles happen in months instead of decades. Future shocks that would have Earth civilizations rioting in the streets if they happened once in a decade are now absorbed with ease. Economic crashes hit like mini-tsunamis and recoveries come just as quick. A decentralized interplanetary replaced the long dead Internet. The Metaverse is a living, breathing AR/VR tapestry that overlays the entire solsys with interactive avatars and objects and information, the info surging right into our contacts and augmented eyeballs. Metaverse Beyond the virtual and AR world the physical world has changed radically too. Only about 1% o the population can drive anything at all, whether cars or ships, because everything from starships to ATVs drive themselves and self repair with redundant, hot swappable parts. Driving is illegal, even in the far out frontiers of space at the edges of Neptune. Special permits for enthusiasts let crazy humans who think they can handle a sports car hurtling along at breathtaking speeds on the new of the solar system take their lives into their own hands. Autobahns In politics and business, the vast AI backbones that power interplanetary business, governments and DAOs, spin the wheels of commerce with superhuman speed. The decision making of old world business and government happened in slow motion by comparison, as bitter old men horse-traded and argued and demonized their enemies and eventually got some broken law passed. The political elite that once ruled over us has given way to , powered by AIs that vote for us on 99% of issues because they already know what we’ll do. Just fill out and the system already knows what you think and it adapts as you change and express your views to it over time. We can always audit or change the vote for a short period after the vote, recorded to immutable quantum cryptographic chains with , but it’s rare for anyone to do it. direct democracy a few quick questions zero knowledge proofs And yet the elites are still there, as they always are, their influence more subtle, hidden in the background. They act as ruling with soft power instead of hard. shadow cliques Politics is no longer nations against nations but planets against planets. Three interplanetary wars have ripped the fragile commonwealth, the last of which destroyed the budding civilization of Mars, forcing a new generation to start again, after gene-hacked roaches chewed through the deadly radiation from planet busting . Quark bombs And the people who control the new dynasties and city states make the old emperors and presidents of Earth, squabbling over tiny patches of dirt, look like the Neanderthals they always were, even if they didn’t know it. More than anything, the people in control know they can’t run the economy alone. They let the machines do it because everything moves at a speed too fast for even augmented minds to handle. The AIs simply adjust the dials of supply and demand in real time, ratcheting factory production up or down and triggering advertisement freezes to control consumer cravings that won’t get met for months. Then they fire those ads up again as goods come off the production line sizzling hot. The ads are micro-calibrated to every person, surging past their defense mechanisms like tailored drugs surging through the blood brain barrier. The machines know our wants and needs better than we do and give it to us before we even know we want it. The rise of AI taught us that humans are nothing but another input and output. Words and emotions are the programming language and the machines can program us with ease. But this is the Matrix. We are not slaves. not We want them to program us. We’ve never known more happiness or fulfillment in any other era. The primitive psychological drugs that we once took hundreds of years ago pale in comparison to regulated brain chemistries balanced by nano insects, programmed by minds vaster than our own to keep us happy and focused as . an enlightened guru We once imagined we were the only masters of our destiny and the sole captain of our ships. Our minds were made up by our own free will. But we know it’s not true now. As we untangled the inner mysteries of our minds’ complex electrochemical field we realized we were just another kind of artificial intelligence, one evolved through the great genetic algorithms of the Earth’s biome. And with that understanding, , the belief that we were special creatures, touched by the hand of an invisible creator, different from the other animals, died a slow death. humanism The people alive now look back on us today and wonder how we ever imagined we could shape our own destiny and that we weren’t shaped by the subtle tides of our own invisible programming? (“More human than human. That’s our motto.” — Tyrell) But can these people even be called people? No. They’re not like us. They feel differently. Think differently. Look differently. They’re as different as we are to Cro-Magnon man. They’re not human. They’re something more. Posthuman. The End of Man The AI alarmists were right to fear that AI would bring about the end of humanity. But they were wrong about how it happened. It wasn’t a . Those were nothing but the fevered dreams of , Frankenstein for the social media age. It wasn’t sentient machines that suddenly gained awareness and decided to exterminate us like roaches. nightmare of Superintelligent machines a primitive people Instead, AI moved inside of us. Merged with us. Transformed us. (Metamorphosis) We embraced AI at deeper and deeper levels. It became more intimate than our all time best lover, whispering in our ears, knowing what we want before we want it. It sprang out of our phones, glasses and smart clothes and into our heads, eyes, arms and legs. Like the long tendrils of rose roots it laced its way around the dendratic forest of our minds and enhanced them to incredible new levels. We could run , entire virtual copies of our personalities in parallel, doing hundreds or thousands of tasks at once, making calls, running numbers, learning new skills, or solving crimes. vSelves Or we could spawn another variation of ourselves just to have someone to talk to and keep us company when someone broke our heart. And we could even spawn new iterations of our personality in a sandbox to see what kind of changes would make us better or more balanced or more ruthless, more cunning or more caring, or more decent or kind or tender or loving. We became our own artificial evolution. Posthuman people think nothing of upgrading themselves the way we used to flip out phones every few years. (Ghosts in the Shell) Replacing your arm with a prosthetic that lasts five times as long as a natural one and doubles the tactile sensations is the same as buying a new dress or a pair of jeans. Swapping out your eyes for ones that see better than 20/10, can see in the dark and show you a rich overlay of meta-information about the world makes perfect sense to someone with a mind upgraded at birth with post-CRISPR gene editing that’s 99.9999% accurate. Mothers and fathers screen their children for diseases before they’re born and buy tweaks to intelligence and athletic ability and longevity. It’s common to have children born in so women don’t have to suffer the pain of childbirth. And children get better nutrients when they’re no longer beholden to the ice cream and pickle cravings of their mothers. exo-wombs Kids are grown like hydroponic plants in the home. And more and more technology moves deep inside of us, biomonitors that monitor cholesterol and stress, vast arrays attached to our spines that let us backup and snapshot our minds, and tiny swarms of nano machines that constantly clean our arteries and repair damage done by free radicals and hunt down cancer cells before they can spread their deadly genetic payload to other victim cells. Tech lives inside us because it’s no longer made of poisonous rare Earth metals. It’s true “soft” ware. We evolved to use the same basic building blocks as Mother Nature. Carbon. Our hardware become wetware. We became what we always were: . Soft machines And it wasn’t just carbon that we could now control with ease. Our powers extended down so much further, to the atomic level. 3D printers evolved to molecular printers, which evolved to atomic printers. Once we could create things atom by atom, the old scarcity economies of Earth no longer made any sense in the face of near limitless abundance. If you had the right printers and the right supply of the basic building blocks of matter you could print up any object from nothing. . Ex nihilo Out of nothing. Into nothing. Control at the atomic level changed the very idea of medicine. No longer did we interact with disease at the chemical level. We could just snapshot a person’s atomic fingerprint at a point in time and reset them to healthier state. Cancer detected. Cells . reset to pre-cancerous state We could roll back the sands of time on our cells. That is, if you had the power and money to do it. The One Becomes the Ten Thousand Things More than anything the AIs moved us from the random evolution of Mother Nature to directed evolution. We accelerated evolution like mad conductors in a great symphony. The AIs can sim through billions of years of evolution in days or months, depending on how many variables we let them process. Even the most powerful intelligent machines can’t process every variable in the known universe, but sometimes a reduced data set is enough. Because of this hyper-accelerated evolution, posthumans are not a single species. We’re thousands of different species now. With aggressive gene editing and prosthetic and virtual versions of life we’ve shattered into a thousand daughter species. Intensive new tribes exist. A single genetic tweak gives one group the power over others. Then their power fades as others adapt and counter their advances with new and better advances. Or that dominance fades, proving to be nothing but an experiment gone wrong. Make people too smart and they easily drift into insanity and . fugue states Make people better at spotting patterns and they spot them everywhere, even seeing them in splattered paint on the wall or in strange floor designs, giving meaning where there is none, making them . fooled by randomness Yet it’s the most balanced posthumans who survive and thrive. They use cutting edge technology but take a conservative approach, not moving too quickly or too slowly. They work with the AIs, in a co-creative process, true centaurs. We dance with the AIs and they dance with us. Creativity is no longer just a singular artist working away like a monk in a cave or a team of creative pros hammering it out on story boards. Scientists don’t experiment with tiny teams, using brute force to try idea after idea, they simulate thousands of years ahead for promising paths first. Toy designers creating the next toy that every kid craves don’t work alone in Geppetto’s workshop. Everything from fashion design to materials science changed as massively parallel genetic algorithms SIMed through millions and then billions of years of evolution to help us. The AIs even designed better AIs, helping us build better versions of our own neural networks. We miniaturized the already small neuron, pushing it past the 1 to 4 micron scale and packing these artificial dendratic forests onto pebble sized arrays we injected into our bodies and minds. And all of this accelerated evolution meant only one thing for the Sapiens who once ruled the small blue planet of Earth with ease. Annihilation. Waves Crashing on the Distant Shores of Time Regular humans disappeared slowly and the quickly. At first radical experimental humans, proto-posthumans who hacked their minds and bodies, were beaten back and killed off and jailed by their violent and ignorant Sapien predecessors. When people tweaked their bodies to add gills, or a third arm, they became easy targets of prejudice and police and genocide. But over time, posthumans got smart. They stopped making radical body changes that stood out and instead tweaked their minds and their bodies in secret, in areas that set themselves up as safe havens or future proof hideaways, the way Singapore set itself up as the ideal business environment or set itself as the center of the crypto universe once upon a time long gone. Zug, Switzerland And soon those posthumans were rising to power all over the world. They were smarter, faster, better looking, more charming. They were hypnotic to regular Sapiens, who struggled to resist their allure. Slowly the laws changed. Culture changed. What was acceptable changed. More and more Sapiens altered little things about themselves too. Why let your child face a deadly disease? If you could take a pill and double your metabolism so you could eat burgers every day and stay thin, why wouldn’t you? It wasn’t a smooth transition. Evolution never is. It moves in fits and starts. There were backlashes, setback: economic shocks that saw the rise of authoritarians who used the radical changes as scapegoats that led to horrific genocides and brutality. Early Patternists were death marched into oblivion. The first attempts to build people that could live longer than everyone else were ironically singled out and slaughtered. But like all violent movements, the raging storm eventually runs out of fury. And progress moves ahead once more, unfettered. And eventually the Sapiens are nothing but a small tribe of people, clinging to a long forgotten past. They fight back, but like the before them, they face an enemy that can out think them, out perform them and out organize them. Neanderthals To the posthumans Sapiens are no smarter than wild horses and just as easily slaughtered if they decide to go mad. The last Sapiens imagined they could stop the future. But just as the Japanese to preserve the power of the sword, they learned that eventually gun beats sword. once tried to keep guns off the island And eventually posthuman beats human. Nothing can hold back the tides of time. ########################################## If you love my work please because that’s where I share special insights with all my fans. visit my Patreon page Top Patrons get EXCLUSIVE ACCESS to so many things: You read it and hear first before anyone else! Early links to every article, podcast and private talk. Ask me anything and I’ll answer. A monthly virtual meet up and Q&A with me. I also share everything I’m working on and give you a behind the scenes look at my process. Access to the legendary Coin Sheets Discord where you’ll find: from me and other pro technical analysis masters. Market calls The only . Coin’bassaders private chat The . private Turtle Beach channel, where coders share various versions of the Crypto Turtle Trader strategy and other signals and trading software look at how I and other pros interpret the market. Behind the scenes ############################################ Now you can listen to this article read by a real voice actor on Listle . ###################################################### I’ve got a new podcast, , covering crypto, AI, tech, the future, history, society and more! Check it out for expanded coverage of my most famous articles and ideas. Get on the RSS feed and never miss an episode and stay tuned for some very special guests in the next few months! The Daily PostHuman ############################################ A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer, pro-blogger, podcaster and public speaker. You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders. when you join my Readers Group. Readers have called it “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and “Detective noir meets Johnny Mnemonic.” You can get a FREE copy of my first novel, The Scorpion Game, ############################################ Lastly, you can , where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more. join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins

AI in Five, Fifty and Five Hundred Years — Part Three — Five Hundred Years

AI in Five, Fifty and Five Hundred Years — Part One

AI in Five, Fifty and Five Hundred Years — Part Two — Fifty Years

The Building Blocks of UI/UX: How Atomic Design Transforms Your Workflow

To what extent that fintechs could possibly disrupt the market is still hard to predict. But the lending business is no doubt undergoing a paradigm shift. The old model of commercial banks was the interest rate spreads and fees backed by fairly rigid regulatory and sophisticated licensing regimes. The conventional perception of commercial banking functions consists of expanding deposits on a significant scale and then chasing after well-connected large businesses to extend credit. Hence, private small enterprises are usually underserved, suffering financial challenges at different critical moments of their life cycle. A review of the cost of lending makes such financing gaps sensible: commercial banks reported that a small business client was profitable only if it purchased more than three products. In China, lending cost to one small or medium-sized enterprise was as high as 30 percent of the country’s GDP per capita in 2013–2014. Yes, call centers and Internet banking had already been widely used, but they were often created and promoted by bureaucrats from individual banks. The technologies tend to be closed systems and information was not shared across crucial SD 4 trillion US dollars globally. Today, we have reached the digital tipping point. Cost reduction and data accessibility are playing instrumental roles in constructing a customer-centric model in the banking industry. Fifty years ago, ATMs were perceived as breakthroughs for financial inclusion, and they squeezed the cost of serving a client for physical banks to 21%. The rise of Internet banking two decades ago further cut it to 4%. When fintechs are beginning to shake up the industry, the cost finally falls to only 1~2%. Looking beyond individual digital gadgets, we can also find innovations that integrate different parts of the ecosystem into one single data analytic compass. By constantly tracking behavioral data pertaining to small retailers on its internet-based shopping platform, Alibaba is closely monitoring their transactions, constantly collecting valuable data that could be used for generating customized credit scores and risk models, which no banks were able to achieve ever before. The lending process that was built on this approach has proved reliable and timely, where oftentimes no collateral is required. Per transaction, the cost of extending credit has dropped by 1000 times to only 0.36 USD for Alibaba. It appears that traditional brick-and-mortar banks are facing steep challenges posed by fintechs. So, is this an alert that new technology entrants will ‘cherry pick’ key products and quickly eat into banks’ small business market share? Should banks be transformed into technology companies? In fact, customer management approaches targeting SME borrowers already existed even prior to this tipping point. IFC Customer Management in SME Banking report suggests that customer management is a concept explaining good practices of understanding customer needs, matching them with banks’ offers, and managing long-lasting relationships through customer life-cycle. Experiences in the EU and the US have revealed that effective customer management leads to greater profitability — ROE performance. In a study carried out by Roland Berger, a consultancy, Banks are categorized into different performance groups as in Figure 1. Group 1 employs customer management approaches. By contrast, Group 4 and 5 banks have not yet seen the value of strategies. The findings have shown a clear relationship between customer management and the ROE of different performance groups. Segmentation is one of the SME customer management strategies. And the IFC report features Garanti Bank in Turkey as a good example, which involves deciding which SMEs to target and identifying segments requiring distinct offers. At the Bank, industrial sectors were used primarily to sub-segment the customer base. Gender was also used as a parameter of sub-segmentation to a degree. Then, the Bank identifies the individual needs of each sub-segment through in-depth market research. This, in turn, facilitates the development of a sub-segment ‘proposition’ comprising around 20 product bundles. Garanti Bank has a market share of SMEs that is three times higher than in its other segments and has become the leading SME bank in Turkey. Other than segmentation, the IFC has also pointed out acquisition, cross-selling, retention, and collection as fundamental customer management phases. If, in the past, only a few banks could afford to acquire the full set of capabilities in customer management due to considerably high overheads and walled fortresses of data scattered around the world, then today’s digital innovation can make this approach much more viable and applicable for the majority. From this perspective, the customer-centric model does not require a sharp switch of industries but can actually be achieved within the banking sector itself with the help of innovative technologies. The real question now is: Will banks successfully marry digital technologies with their SME customer management approaches in this new age of ‘creative destruction’? If yes, how? If No, why not? Note: The author is the founder of Stonelake Capital (www.stonelake.capital) and wrote this article as a consultant to the World Bank Group. To what extent that fintechs could possibly disrupt the market is still hard to predict. But the lending business is no doubt undergoing a paradigm shift. The old model of commercial banks was the interest rate spreads and fees backed by fairly rigid regulatory and sophisticated licensing regimes. The conventional perception of commercial banking functions consists of expanding deposits on a significant scale and then chasing after well-connected large businesses to extend credit. Hence, private small enterprises are usually underserved, suffering financial challenges at different critical moments of their life cycle. A review of the cost of lending makes such financing gaps sensible: commercial banks reported that a small business client was profitable only if it purchased more than three products. In China, lending cost to one small or medium-sized enterprise was as high as 30 percent of the country’s GDP per capita in 2013–2014. Yes, call centers and Internet banking had already been widely used, but they were often created and promoted by bureaucrats from individual banks. The technologies tend to be closed systems and information was not shared across crucial SD 4 trillion US dollars globally. Today, we have reached the digital tipping point. Cost reduction and data accessibility are playing instrumental roles in constructing a customer-centric model in the banking industry. Fifty years ago, ATMs were perceived as breakthroughs for financial inclusion, and they squeezed the cost of serving a client for physical banks to 21%. The rise of Internet banking two decades ago further cut it to 4%. When fintechs are beginning to shake up the industry, the cost finally falls to only 1~2%. Looking beyond individual digital gadgets, we can also find innovations that integrate different parts of the ecosystem into one single data analytic compass. By constantly tracking behavioral data pertaining to small retailers on its internet-based shopping platform, Alibaba is closely monitoring their transactions, constantly collecting valuable data that could be used for generating customized credit scores and risk models, which no banks were able to achieve ever before. The lending process that was built on this approach has proved reliable and timely, where oftentimes no collateral is required. Per transaction, the cost of extending credit has dropped by 1000 times to only 0.36 USD for Alibaba. It appears that traditional brick-and-mortar banks are facing steep challenges posed by fintechs. So, is this an alert that new technology entrants will ‘cherry pick’ key products and quickly eat into banks’ small business market share? Should banks be transformed into technology companies? In fact, customer management approaches targeting SME borrowers already existed even prior to this tipping point. IFC Customer Management in SME Banking report suggests that customer management is a concept explaining good practices of understanding customer needs, matching them with banks’ offers, and managing long-lasting relationships through customer life-cycle. Experiences in the EU and the US have revealed that effective customer management leads to greater profitability — ROE performance. In a study carried out by Roland Berger, a consultancy, Banks are categorized into different performance groups as in Figure 1. Group 1 employs customer management approaches. By contrast, Group 4 and 5 banks have not yet seen the value of strategies. The findings have shown a clear relationship between customer management and the ROE of different performance groups. Segmentation is one of the SME customer management strategies. And the IFC report features Garanti Bank in Turkey as a good example, which involves deciding which SMEs to target and identifying segments requiring distinct offers. At the Bank, industrial sectors were used primarily to sub-segment the customer base. Gender was also used as a parameter of sub-segmentation to a degree. Then, the Bank identifies the individual needs of each sub-segment through in-depth market research. This, in turn, facilitates the development of a sub-segment ‘proposition’ comprising around 20 product bundles. Garanti Bank has a market share of SMEs that is three times higher than in its other segments and has become the leading SME bank in Turkey. Other than segmentation, the IFC has also pointed out acquisition, cross-selling, retention, and collection as fundamental customer management phases. If, in the past, only a few banks could afford to acquire the full set of capabilities in customer management due to considerably high overheads and walled fortresses of data scattered around the world, then today’s digital innovation can make this approach much more viable and applicable for the majority. From this perspective, the customer-centric model does not require a sharp switch of industries but can actually be achieved within the banking sector itself with the help of innovative technologies. The real question now is: Will banks successfully marry digital technologies with their SME customer management approaches in this new age of ‘creative destruction’? If yes, how? If No, why not? Note: The author is the founder of Stonelake Capital (www.stonelake.capital) and wrote this article as a consultant to the World Bank Group. Note: The author is the founder of Stonelake Capital (www.stonelake.capital) and wrote this article as a consultant to the World Bank Group. Note: The author is the founder of Stonelake Capital (www.stonelake.capital) and wrote this article as a consultant to the World Bank Group.

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