Who Am Us Anyway?
Who do we really think we are?
One answer has been: Tool Maker.
At a certain level of evolution we are a modern species of ambitious monkey that imagines, crafts and uses tools. Always have been.
A recent find in Germany has uncovered a cache of very large, finely crafted and balanced hunting spears dated to be 400,000 years old. The oldest complete set of hunting weapons ever discovered, which changes prior conceptions of our ancient human ancestors from being opportunistic scavengers into systematic, organized and cooperative predators.
Technology, it seems, is one of those things we do naturally in order to succeed and also stimulate ourselves. New technology always shows up first, within succeeding cultural generations, as our finest instruments of music, art, hunting and warfare. Devices and gadgets, tools, instruments and machinery all imagined, designed, developed, built and used to enhance human abilities and accessorize or empower our memories, desires, dreams and insights.
From the extraordinary, 16,000 year old, painted caves at Lascaux we can fast forward to a digital 3D AVATAR in IMAX. Realizing that it’s metaphorically the same cave in which we have always employed our best practice technology to express and convey our dreams and visions. From sticks and stones, bows and arrows, Bunker Blasters and Hydrogen Bombs, we also employ competitive techniques to release our aggressions with ever newer tools of “shock and awe.”
The novelty and challenge of our current situation relates to the exponential rate at which our technology is now developing, along with an accompanying explosive increase of our accumulated information being communicated, retained, searched and duplicated.
Not so long ago computers were the size of large buildings but for a generation now they have been “carry on” luggage. Twenty years ago there was no World Wide Web, Internet or e-Mail. Today the wires are disappearing as we use Wireless Broadband and Smart Phones. Also, there are now more active web pages on-line than there are currently people on the planet; and both are growing. New languages become spoken in Geek and multi-competitive digital software codes, as new concepts, protocols and expanding networks lead us down the garden path into growing untested possibilities. A networked global society, empowered by tools, suddenly emerges, taking us from the Wright Brothers at Kittyhawk to Space Shuttles traveling out to a permanently staffed space station in less than 80 years.
All of us have been experiencing an unprecedented and spontaneous adoption to an ubiquitous technology becoming embedded into our daily lives, as millions of people around the planet have became global citizens and hyper-linked 24/7. This stupendous cultural development has surprisingly occurred without any real proposals or discussions, other than the marketing and promotion of “The Future” such as the Jetson’s Theme Song:
These amusing, clever cultural Meme’s seduce and drive us like a migratory species into a new digital landscape. An electronic real estate, that lives no-where, but exists everywhere, moving at the speed of light. A “silly putty” reality where anything goes as content and culture morphs and mutates within a dance of 0’s & 1’s. Producing mash-ups and re-mixes of all that went before, goes on now and strives into becoming, as we collectively surf the waves of novelty in a psychological climate of familiar yet growing strangeness. We call it Post-Modern, but really, it is the really bumpy and dangerous patch between succeeding ages in our evolution in consciousness. Is there any wonder that a ‘love-hate’ – ‘fear-desire’ – agnostic belief in “whatever” becomes a default psychological position for the mutating monkeys migrating towards their singular date with fate?
As to the question “Will Technology Replace Biology”– well, the facts are that human consciousness has already merged with the machine. Because we all live inside a vast machine culture and fantasy world that our ancestor dreamed but has become dangerously cut off from the natural world. This artificial paradise scenario has already become a science-fiction technological fix on our daily reality such that we are totally dependent upon it. We become weaker physically and also dumber overall as we can Google any question but cannot personally verify the conflicting information.
Yet, we still remain biological beings, responsive to the same old mother-matrix organic analog world of wind and rain, sun and surf. We naturally remain illogical, deep feeling, loving and even rude people, despite our machines and the multi-tasking addictions they tempt us to attain. Human consciousness has always been a work in process, enjoying an unbroken evolution both biologically and culturally, and we shall naturally become mad, self-destructive and quickly extinct if we insist on cloning ourselves inside static, objectified boxes; no matter how god-like and heavenly they may seem to be. To be ultimately successful our technology will begin to merge into the background, in a great disappearing act, as our tools and devices become immersed into our biological world and we potentially evolve into a richer, deeper culture in response to the organic impulses that naturally drive humanity’s quest.
“Machines are junk waiting to happen.”
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Humans however live at the ‘speed of life’ and are adoptive, beautiful, inscrutable, sexy, precious and unique to the universe; as far as we can tell. See for example, Monty Python’s The Galaxy Song:
About the Author: James Harvey is a poet, a mystic, a seasoned Light worker and learned observer of Life… Most recently, he is the author of the thought provoking book Singularia: Being at the Edge of Time.
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- James Harvey’s Singularia: a “Both/And” Point of View of the Singularity (Part 1) (singularityblog.singularitysymposium.com)
