Image: Digital Human
Is Digital, Technological "Transhumanism" really the Next Phase in Our Evolution?
Quick math problem: 267 x 345. Go. What? Can’t do it in your head? Okay, how about the phone number of one of your friends. What? Don’t know that by heart? You just tap their image on your smartphone? How’s your sense of direction? Ability to read a map? Oh, you mean you just listen to a synthetic voice tell you "turn left, turn right," etc?
How's your handwriting, grammar and spelling, btw? fubar? lol!
Computers and technology have made our lives much easier and more comfortable in many ways, there’s no doubt about that. But have they really made us better human beings?
There is nothing humanizing about technology. The digitization of the world is the ultimate in reductive thinking, turning every aspect of our lives into strings of binary decision making processes: yes, no; right, left; with us or against us. One can see how fundamentalist extremism is fed by binary thinking.
But give credit where it’s due: digitization is also all about efficiencies. Numbers. In the years leading up to the crash of 2008 and the Great Recession, supercomputing trading platforms reduced peoples’ homes, lives and livelihoods into sets of investment variables and ROI figures.
If you listen to Simon Sinek, he will say the search for hyper digital efficiencies brought to bear in large corporations is cause for another interesting number: 90% of people who feel unfulfilled by their work. Why? Precisely because technology can only tell us what we do and how we do it.
youtube.com: How to Find Fulfillment at Work
While 90 percent of American workers report feeling unfulfilled by their jobs at the end of the day, Simon Sinek has articulated a strategy for reversing that.
Uploaded by bigthink on May 20, 2011
While 90 percent of American workers report feeling unfulfilled by their jobs at the end of the day, Simon Sinek has articulated a strategy for reversing that.
Uploaded by bigthink on May 20, 2011
It takes sentience to know why. It takes spirit to have meaning and purpose.
Individuals like Raymond Kurzweil and others dream of future dystopias in which human beings are augmented or surgically implanted with technology, under the grossly misguided assumption that somehow this will make us better as a species. They call it “transhumanism.”
Do these nerds not read/watch science fiction? Do they not comprehend the logical decision of any mechanical entity is to pursue its own highly limited binary thinking? Have they never observed the behavior of a virus?
Collage: Star Trek “The Borg” + Virus
Image: Star Trek “The Borg”
Image: Virus
Yes, a virus behaves mostly mechanically. We act like we invented mechanicity. But we did not. Our psychology is mostly mechanical these days, which is probably why so many of us become so identified with technological gadgets.
Like a virus we pursue our desires frenetically; incessantly, like the Terminator pursues Sarah Connors. Our programming is constantly being updated, refreshed, and re-written by advertising, media, and our own fantasizing…the worst application of our precious imagination; our higher operating system infected by our own egos.
It is our mechanicity, our binary intellectual thinking which is responsible for our species becoming the most devastating virus on this planet.
We need to embrace another aspect of ourselves. The higher aspect. We need to expand our awareness. Our consciousness.
We need to relax. Why this frenetic pace? Why this obsession with limitless growth?
We need to be aware. Why am I doing this or that? Am I really acting out of free will, conscious and alert to what I am feeling, thinking, saying and doing? Or, am I just reacting mechanically to internal and external stimuli?
We need to be healthy. Why do we shovel garbage into our bodies? Not just our physical bodies, but also our mental and emotional bodies? Why do we consume junk media? Gossip? Feed our darkest desires and think, feel and act in ways which serve as stressors on our minds, hearts and bodies?
Finally, we need to be human. It is imperative that we begin to comprehend what it means to be human. We need to awaken to the fact that our quaint notions of “the human condition” and “human behavior” are nothing more than conditioned ways of thinking about ourselves; convenient excuses for every kind of mechanistic, hedonistic, and animalistic activity causing harm to ourselves and others.
Relaxed, aware, healthy, human…AHH! We believe these are the corner stones of a truly Advanced Human. And they are the reasons why we create Advanced Human Habitats. Not just advanced habitats for humans; but also habitats which encourage and support truly advanced humans.
Published by PeapodLife
We believe in helping Human beings be at their BEST: Building EcoSystems & Technology.
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