FROM THE PREFACE…

So I had this idea in a hire car, stuck in traffic, on the way in to Palma. Human 2.0. What if they’d done an upgrade but forgotten to tell us?

And what you are about to read came to me pretty much fully formed on that journey. There was a long line of traffic to the city car park, I’ll grant you that. But, let me tell you, I was more than buzzed by the idea and how it was forming. It became one of the best lines of traffic I’ve ever been in.

Later, back in the villa where I was staying and when I next logged on, the guys who were doing my new website at the time co-incidentally asked me what domain name I would want to use for the project. They suggested I might want to grab domain names around both my past and – as I then thought – current book projects (references to these you’ll find on davidfirth.com). Well, I thought, good question. How about Human2.0.com ? Which in turn prompted me immediately to get paranoid that maybe someone else had come up with the idea before me. You know how ideas are.

And my paranoia was right – approximately. You know how paranoia is.

Nobody had written a book called Human 2.0, but there were references to that phrase. Have a look yourself on Google, they’re probably still there. Mostly they were saying that Human 2.0 was going to be better when we had a mobile phone in our head, or multiple computer chips under our skin. Or something.

And what I found there triggered another memory: a time I heard on the UK’s BBC Radio Five Live a bunch of people – who to be fair did the noble thing and described themselves as ranging from “the most legitimate Stanford professors to the cookiest New Agers” – suggesting it would be a good thing that we get excited about the emerging sciences that make it theoretically possible that we might, as humans, live for 200, 300 or even 1000 years.

And I thought: is this life not enough for you? You want to have a computer in it and have it live for 1000 years? The sexy upgrade: available, but not necessary.

As if we’ve solved all the problems built in to this iteration.

Maybe it’s a good idea: take this frustrated, anxiety-ridden, pain-encumbered, only-fleetingly happy being and let it live forever. With an i-pod in its arse.

Yes. I think that should solve most of the world’s problems .

We get manuals for our fridge, our toaster, our cars, our hair dye. It is time we had one for the rest of our lives…