Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Other Eye

A lot of creepy science fiction ideas are slowly making their way from the minds of authors to the supermarket shelves...mind control, mind reading, suspended animation, vat grown meat, killer robots...combine these with the internet and it's like we're on the verge of wiring humanity.

Despite my knee-jerk appreciation for change, I'm not sure about this particular light bulb. These technologies bridge the divide between the inner and the outer, and with them comes the promise of a break with history, a break with the concepts and outlook of a pre-wired humanity. Challenging past conceptions is one thing, destroying our ability to understand the past is another. The living need the dead, despite the latter's desire for brains, and we shouldn't accelerate too quickly away from the ghosts that surround us.

We should also be asking if facilitating communication is worth limiting the extent of independent evolution. Easing the divide between the subgroups that exist within a wider human population, though an avenue to peace, will leave me living in a world without communists and cannibals. I will be bored, and will taunt the global web of minds with looped images of static amoeba until we return to disconnect.

3 comments:

ElectricJoe said...

Oh come now, the blurring between the inner and outer-self has already been pioneered by the schizophrenics. So your worries are old news, Mr. I'm Scared of Change.

halfmath said...

And soon that joy will be here for all: they're even building a gun to mimic schizophrenia!

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