So, I stumbled across an article
about the creation of brain-powered prosthetics and was hit with an epiphany of
just how staggering this development is.
Though inconceivably complex to most of us, this is an advancement with incredibly
deep implications for the future of humanity.
The fact that we now have the ability to wire up a paralyzed woman so
that she can feed herself using her own brain signals in much the same way she
would have used them to move working arms means that we are taking the very
first, tentative steps towards decoding the “operating system” of our minds,
the DOS of our id as it were. If we can
do that, it is only a matter of time before we can decode the human brain,
accessing the organic memory, allowing our thoughts, our memories, our
personalities, our deepest secrets, in essence our very souls to be read,
downloaded and stored in devices made not by nature, but by industry.
Many of the consequences of this
are obvious such as the detriments to our privacy and the susceptibility to
mind control by outside entities, but the potential advantages are equally
mind-blowing. Can you imagine learning
how to play guitar like Eric Clapton just by downloading the ability directly
into your head from the internet?
Learning a foreign language fluently in a matter of seconds rather than
years? And what about going back to the
body parts? With this technology, you
could even replace your perishable organs as they wear out, transforming
yourself from a fragile carbon-based life form into a silicon-based one that is
virtually immortal, a being finally able to conceivably conquer insurmountable
challenges such as interstellar space travel.
This is a development that would have a cataclysmic impact on higher
evolution itself, accelerating the process without the inconvenience and loss
of potential that results from death!
And if life eventually leaps from
an organic to a quasi-mechanical state, would we inevitably lose some of the
true pleasures we experience in human form?
With our needs based on recharging rather than nourishment, we would
lose the need to eat and all the joy we derive from that. And without the need to reproduce
biologically, would the ability to love also become a casualty of evolutionary
advancement? Would our teenagers be
locking themselves into bathrooms with copies of Popular Mechanics instead of
something published by the successors to Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt?
Or would we be interconnecting on
far deeper level, our minds networked together so that we all share every piece
of information intelligent beings have ever documented, across continents,
planets and even galaxies, bringing up the complexities and intricacies of the
theories of quantum physics just as easily as we can now pull up the chorus of
our favorite songs in our present manifestation? Would robotic life have tolerance for a
traditional human existence, seeing us affectionately as a developing
manifestation of itself, a higher being in larval form akin to what a caterpillar
is to a butterfly, or would it regard us as a destructive infestation to be
exterminated for the safety of its more resilient species? And if we were networked, what would it do to
our individuality? Would that prove
fatal to the last vestiges of what made us human and turn us into a sort of
futuristic mega-organism, driven to manipulate our environment strictly for the
benefit and goals of the entirety with total and complete disregard for the welfare
of the singular entity, making us behave more like a colony of ants than the
collection of diverse ideas and mindsets that created it? For that matter, without the biological needs
of eating and reproducing, would the species even need to manipulate the environment,
transcending the requirement for a physical embodiment altogether and existing
purely in some sort of omnipresent, observatory cyberian plane, thriving only
upon a constant influx of insight, sensation and experience in a state of
digital nirvana of sorts? And once
there, what could possibly be the next step?
Creating matter from what is otherwise a conceptual existence until it
creates a mass so dense that it explodes in a force powerful enough to destroy
everything in existence and starting the process all over from scratch?
Sorry about that. It’s quite a leap I know. I’m not on drugs or anything this evening,
that’s just the way my mind works on those very few occasions that I find
myself completely home alone with nothing good on TV.
Wow. I
can’t believe you really read all this.
If I thought you were going to do that, I would have used words with
fewer syllables.
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