Brain going 24X7X365 thanks to tech

There was a time when we could do nothing from sunset to sunrise but sleep. Even with the invention of fire and the lamp, it was just about enough to do basic tasks, and you would be awake a little bit longer. With the invention of electricity, you could theoretically do anything for 24 hours but still the bedtime got merely extended.

There were inventions that would see you through the nightlike books and global radio. Still, everything seemed to have a cut-off time. The dam burst with the proliferation of night shifts, 24-hour TV, the Internet and video games. Now you could do anything 24 hours a day. In many cities in the world nightlife flourished.

All this was for recreation. The common man worked fixed hours and wouldn’t dream of working all night. In the early days factories had fixed long shifts and at the end of it you simply went home. When it came to blue collar jobs in the evening you switched off your computer in the office and went home.

The first real work disruptor that sent you towards a 24-hour day was the laptop. You could take your work home. You could use it in the car, bus, train, plane and cybercafé. You could take it with you on vacation.

The ultimate extender of them all joined the ranks: The smartphone. More convenient than the laptop, now you could check your work emails all the time along with your social media feed. People have extended their waking hours into the night thanks to it and check it first thing in the morning groggy eyed. Our eyesight is deteriorating as are our schedules and quality of sleep. We are already cyborgs with the smartphone becoming a personal unattached device. How long before the device becomes attached? Neuralink and AI will take us to the next level—we can be connected with the world even while sleeping.

Are we destined to be just another device? There are billions of devices already in play. What if the human being became a device connected to all the millions of data centers and hundreds of millions of IoTs? The term Internet came from: Interconnected network of computers. It will soon be an interconnected network of devices, data centers, IoTs, sensors and humans. We will be just another cog in the wheel. Another bit in the byte.

In the end we will probably be networking 20 hours a day and sleeping 4 hours a day. And in those 4 hours of sleep, we would still be connected to the Internet and do something productive. Is this the future of our evolution? Is this the singularity?