Patti Maes from the MIT Media Lab – that nifty place full of really smart people who invent a lot of the future – gave a TED Talk about a new system Pranav Mistry and others have developed to allow us more direct and intuitive interaction with our expanding infoworld. It’s called: Sixth Sense.
This dovetails nicely with what Ray Kurzweil and Kevin Kelly have been going on about – the eventual meshing and merging of ourselves with our technology, becoming ubiquitous users of and used by our toys and tools. Kurzweil speaks of the Singularity. Kelly speaks of the One Mind. I think they’re both right and at some point in our lifetime we”ll get to see just how wrong Azimov‘s robotic vision was, along with the Terminator and the Matrix dystopias.
We aren’t going to get saved or oppressed by the technology of our future – we’re going to become the technology; which only makes sense when you look at it from McLuhan‘s perspective that any tech we create is a mere extension of ourselves.
Will we change? You bet your ass we will. Will it be for the better? Well, looking around at this piss poor excuse for a brutish, nasty, sociopathic monkey world we’ve created I’d have to say – it can’t make it worse.
Will we survive? Ah – there’s the rub.
Let’s see what Susan Blackmore has to say about it in her TED Talk on memes and temes:
And if that doesn’t stoke your imagination – or make you run around screaming – about the future of human beings becoming one with their tech, don’t forget to consider the recent news story on the UK geezer with his bionic eye, the Canadian filmmaker who plans on shooting a documentary with his camera eye and the amazing Aimee Mullins and her talk at TED where she shows off her 12 pairs of staggering (please pardon the pun) prosthetic legs:
Are we going to change?
God, I hope so.
And when we do – we’ll be beautiful.
Cheers.
P. S. I wanted to post about this yesterday but my site was down so all I managed was this Twitter post.
Tags: azimov, blackmore, kelly, kurzweil, maes, mcluhan, meme, MIT, mullins, neat shit, tech, TED, teme
TED talks & Rob’s Fucked up Blog,
Every so often I need to bathe myself in this bubbly wash of intelligence and aesthetic humanity. It’s the alkali to my acidic cynicism. A scholarly bubble-bath that cleanses the soul, is a bunch o’ fun, and doesn’t leave a ring around the ol’ brain pan.
I’ve been struggling lately, trying to keep my head above the water and, as a consequence, am a bit “wet behind th’ ears” as far as taking advantage of tech.
Thank you Rob for continually dredging this stuff to the surface.
A lifebouy of hope for humanity… and me.
I guess we may not be washed up after all.
Oddly enough, when I proof-read my silly, soused statements back… it reminds me how I do so enjoy sitting in a big tub and making fart bubbles!
>sigh<
xf
Oh c’mon… really?… Zen Captcha: waterworks yor
Yer funny, Fred.
I have an image of you, half-tipsy, half-submerged in the hot tub, with your keyboard just beyond reach of the water but just close enough to the Stolys.
Thanks for the kind words. When I wax enthusiastic or hopeful like that I must admit it is partly me pleading to the universe for some sense of salvation or redemption for the wretched poo flinging monkeys that strut and preen upon this rocky sphere.
And if you think “waterworks yor” was an on-the-money Zen Captcha, try this one on for size:
Radio existence
no shit
“Oooooo-weeee-oooooooo!!!!”
Cheers.
[...] This kind of stuff has been consuming me lately because I think it is really fucking cool and pant peeingly scary. I’m not a technophobe by any stretch of the imagination and have no problems envisioning a future where we and our machines are one. The idea of the Borg makes for good storytelling but it’s not a frightening future in my eyes. [...]
[...] prompted some positive and negative reactions in the blogosphere. The naive optimist view (e.g., here) is that this is a small step toward more capabale (and perhaps even enlightened) humanity. A less [...]