About this episode
Charles Ostman returns to explore the revolutionary world of nanotechnology and its implications for human civilization. Ostman describes machines with moving parts so microscopic they remain invisible to the naked eye, representing a fundamental shift toward what he calls "technological convergence." This convergence represents the interconnection of previously autonomous scientific disciplines, industries, and socioeconomic systems through advanced connectivity networks like the Internet. Drawing from his extensive background in national laboratory systems and cybernetics research, Ostman explains how the Internet has evolved far beyond a simple communication network into what he terms "an organism" with neural network capabilities. His academic paper presented to the European Society of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics reveals that researchers worldwide are recognizing the Internet's transformation into something resembling a global synthetic neural network. Ostman discusses how this technological convergence is accelerating exponentially, creating unprecedented rates of change that push civilization toward a critical threshold. The implications extend beyond mere technological advancement to fundamental alterations in how human society functions, communicates, and evolves in an increasingly interconnected digital ecosystem.