|
Electric monks, Skynet and Facebook
Posted by: MikeZilla on Feb 08, 2010
Douglas Adams thought up the idea of the electric monk back in 1987 a ridiculously far-fetched idea, in a book described on its cover as a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic". The theory was that in a society so ravaged by in-attentiveness the logical extension of our insanity is to start employing robots to complete all the additional work we've added to our lives.
Beta max or VHS
The thinking is we already had video machines (remember those?) to watch television for us, cassette recorders (remember those?) to listen to music for us what next? I mean we created tv and then to overcame the burden of actually watching it we create another device...
So... the question Mr. Adams asks is simple, what next? A monk to believe things for us? An interesting place to start. The idea of a machine designed to take over such a human function would have seemed bizarre to me back in 1987, mostly because I was 7 years old and hadn't yet gotten the symbolism of Adams' monk.
Skynet or the Matrix
Now 23 years later I'm astounded how close we've come, perhaps not in monk form but we're getting there. Handing over our humanity to machines in the name of efficiency. The machines were always likely to take over but it was not going to be in the form of a lost war against skynet, like the terminator movies. It was always going to be given away. We're pouring more and more of our collective humanity into curing the human condition. We're treating our humanity like a disease and prescribing digital band aids. We meet people online. Chat online. We have willingly built our social networks in the air. We don't know our neighbor's first name but we talk to strangers on the other side of the world. The idea of suplementing our lifestyles with digital aids is not a new one. I'm all for it. We have the intellect lets make it count.
I just don't see the point of building a large and cumbersome digital solution for problems that are digital in origin.
Let's work on building up the downtrodden. Let's simplify our lives. Lets put affordable technology in the hands of everyone. Let's not pretend that Facebook matters. It's a global phenomenon that is based on filling a digital need that's been digitally created. |
