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.
