The Alpha Life Cycle

THE STUDY OF GENERATIONS, their definition, characteristics and aspiration, is the fudge of lifestyle magazine gossip. Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials are stirred into this confectionery mix with their respective liking for styles of clothing, job prospects or anything else that can be measured. This is a streetwise rendition of the work of Karl Mannheim, the Hungarian sociologist who kick-started this category craze over a century ago. Nomenclature is never accidental though.

Generation Z has a ring of finality to it. It is followed by Generation Alpha and this suggests a new start. In many ways it is: the first age cohort born entirely in the twenty-first century, also the first to be swaddled in a digital blanket from its conception: Bluetooth is as natural to it as baby formula. Generation Alpha shuffled into the limelight in 2010, the year the iPad was invented and the iPhone assumed worldwide presence after completing its development cycle.

There is more to the term 'alpha' than is readily understood. Alpha refers to a software release life cycle in which a prototype is developed to reach maturity before its commercial entrée into the world. This Alpha/Beta test terminology originated from IBM* but, more recently, Microsoft has delineated the stages of Alpha software development into five stages: Pre-alpha, Alpha, Beta, Release candidate and Stable. The last takes the product to manufacturing (or “going gold”) and general availability to the public. Thereafter successive reissues of an operating system incorporate minor changes, including security updates, bug fixes, patches and general improvement to its internal coherence. This language is familiar territory to anyone with a computer.

This software release life cycle is mirrored by the device release life cycle. Interestingly, Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), interprets the human – that's you and me – to be a device.

Schwab claims biometrics – the detection of a person’s traits (not just physical) by electronic surveillance to confirm identity – will help us reimagine what it is to be human. There are two stages to this reimagining. First, he says, we place a digital marker in our clothing, a reference, of course, to the Android and Apple mobile phones in our pockets. Second, we implant microchips under our skin or in our brain to link our biological self with the physical and digital worlds. These two stages reveal a direction of travel: from mobile router (a Pre-alpha state) to biological computer (Stable) when we are subject to downloading update. We might not limit our imagination of all this loose terminology to past human paradigms, for Noah Yuval Harari, feted public intellectual and advisor to the WEF, claims the human – again, that's you and me – does not possess a soul. We are comprised of data and as such are hackable.

Many studies indicate that the medical solution of the last two years contains self-assembly nanotechnology and graphene oxide; fact checkers, of course, say otherwise. mRNA delivered nanotechnology is only the first rung of a hackable data ladder. Before long, Harari assures us, AI will know what we think or need quicker than we ever can ourselves.

What Schwab and Harari fail to disclose is that though they initially talk of the human (which is analogue and, because of its tendency to degrade, brittle), this definition is evolutionary. The transhuman is evolved product. If the human is a factory setting apparatus out of the box of creation, the transhuman is a part-digital product comprising both nanotechnology and nervous system; it's the Biblical melding of iron and clay. And any understanding of the term transhumanism must take account of its prefix – trans – which denotes a work in progress. In other words, it's a prototype under development, to be upgraded through Beta and Release Candidate. The release life cycle will actually "go gold" with the posthuman, Satan's counterfeit creation.

When asked in 2016 how long it would take for the realisation of chips embedded in our bodies, Schwab answered “certainly in the next ten years.” This is coincidental with the close of Generation Alpha in the mid-2020s. Perhaps Generation Z and devices before it will become obsolete product at this point. They need no longer be supported.

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The Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy was signed by President Biden on 12th September, 2022. It legislates that scientists will “be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” It even declares that testing is not required in the development of genetic engineering technologies and techniques. Meanwhile, advertising for medical intervention employs graphics that suggest the human body needs to be recharged with battery power.

* IBM also offered us the ATM, the floppy disc, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database and SQL programming language, the UPC barcode and dynamic random-access memory.