On Automation

I am a child of the popular culture; my essays are supplemented by quotes from songs rather than long dead greek philosophers, I believe in anything that is incredible, I live more at home with machinery than the organic lifestyle that I know is good for me.

Crichton has a great profile: he is a MD, a research biologist, a science fiction writer and movie screen player writer. He brought real-live dinosaurs into our 20th century fantasy-less lives. In 1972, he wrote ‘The Terminal Man’. Maybe in the distant future our descendants might consider his writing to be ‘prophetic’ like we do with H.G.Wells or Jules Verne. And if we want only rosy futures for our children to be, we will hope he is hopelessly wrong.

Animax is a view into the very warped Japanese popular culture, obsessed with the AI, robots and the next step that humanity will take. ‘Ghost in the shell: Stand Alone Complex’ is one example program, who’s protagonist is a disturbing mix of human and machine parts. She is capable of driving on the roads, physically and parallely participating in an online discussion from her mind. She receives instructions as data from her boss and peers, has add-ons that can make her invisible and she enjoys an occasional fine wine. She can’t be called android or humanoid. In fact the tagline of this program is ‘in the future, when the distinction between the digital and the physical is blurred’. It’s a popular show, as are many others of the same genre.

Which brings me to the point I am pondering on;
are we as an entire species being desensitized enough to ignore our alarming dependence on independent machinery?
Are we like the starving people of under-developed countries who sweat out in production of Nike shoes that they will never use?
Are we contributing to the creation of this massive intelligence that will eventually take over?
A move we’ll not notice as we live out our lab rat like life where we get food for all our senses on time and therefore don’t notice ‘reality’.

Automation is the key word in my profession. Like digging deep pits for our measurements, we are being paid and maintained to make the systems that will work with minimum human interference. Like Neumann would have dismissed the almost instantaneous growth that has lead to micro computers as fiction, we are quite at ease watching AI run rampant in our television screens and gaming consoles as we feel they would be functional and a threat to someone else in the future, not now, not us.
What if the future is now?
Is it wise to give autonomy to systems and let them control us at our most intimate level?
Banking and money transfer is completely automated now. And the various systems that operated are all interconnected. If one fine day we don’t have out ATMs working and the bank records are not retrievable, all hell will break loose.
Rich are so proud of their state-of the art security systems that keep the intruders out, to see it from the other way, they are just building fancy jails for themselves, from where they’ll need machine acceptance to come out of.
Medicine and surgery is now completely dependant on monitoring systems and stat charts, without these, our doctors can only give out bandages and hand out morphine; the very stage medicine was at during the American civil war.

What is most disturbing is the automation in people; we lead robotic lives. Our movements, eating, sleeping, thinking and behavior are all regulated. We crave for expensive under wear which is like any other normally priced version, except that it sports the words ‘calvin klein’ in it. Why not use a marker and get your kicks cheaper?
Women world-wide cultivate bulimia in order to look ‘right’ which is synonymous with-emaciation, simultaneously scarring their psyche forever; men pump their body with steroids to get the ‘strong’ look, while they get weaker and more dependant on chemicals.

Any deviance is termed abnormal and is abhorred and mitigated. Our education weeds out freethinkers as ‘problem-children’ and lateral processing as ‘idling away’ and encourages those who have been mind-controlled best by their parents, society and the trends. If all the early men had gone about hunting and gathering and dying in the cold, we wouldn’t have come about, but for that one abnormal guy who wanted to rub two sticks together while the others laughed at him.

Evolution is occurring in present tense, as it has been from the start of life on this planet.
We will change into the beings of the future, but they shouldn’t be part mechanical. Our minds should evolve, enlarge, integrate and our evolution should be spiritual.

I don’t pretend to have the solutions. I just think there are some problems that have not been recognized.

Let ‘Dystopian’ not describe our futures,
Rain.