Bathroom Monologue: He Has To Wonder At 130
johnwiswell.blogspot.com
johnwiswell.blogspot.com
You get the idea. The more accessible information is, the more you wonder.
This is a good story with multiple good interpretations. I myself read the story as a warning against working all day and being available through cellphones, intracells and whatnot:
Without intracell assistance, his natural hearing is so weak that he misses all the grinding and screaming around him. He wonders what this feeling is called.
People need silence and peace. We need to let our brain relax once in a while.
You could interpret it as a "back to nature"-story. You could also interpret the story to tell us that we don't have to think as much as we did earlier: We use the Internet and other means of communication to find the answers we are looking for. When we don't have those tools available, we have to think. Your interpretation is yet another good interpretation.
1) And remember.
How many people's phone numbers do you have memorized? Far fewer than you did before they were all programmed into your phone's address book.
2) I'll think.
I think I'll stop reading the NY Times on my phone for a while and instead take those times to ponder.
It makes perfect sense for people to be frightened when a story is about how we screwed up the future by arrogantly pushing the limits of technology, Skynet and all that.
But there's no war here, no famine, there's not even a computer enslaving us or keeping us as pets. Just chips in people's heads helping them do what they want.
Oh, the horror...?
Generally: I'd prefer an upgrade, but I worry that if we achieve strong AI it will be an extremely difficult problem [1] to ensure it behaves nicely -- so replacement may be more likely than upgrading. If we focus on augmenting human intelligence and not on developing independent intelligence this may be less of a problem, but I don't know which research paths will be more fruitful.
[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenceThe key message I take away from this is that the longer we allow ourselves to continue along a path this path of disconnection, the more jarring the (inevitable) reconnection will be when it arrives.
Food for thought.
Arguably, all of the developments in his post were allowed by a greater understanding of nature and our role in it.
We're becoming capable of connecting with nature on far deeper terms; as participants rather than spectators. The desirability of that is a personal issue; many of our fears of it probably stem from the idea that 'playing God' is bad.
Firstly to address the point about human action being "part of nature": of course we are members of the natural world however I think the "disconnection" here that I'm picking up on the in the story is the archetypal story of disconnection told in Genesis. Getting kicked out of the garden of eden (a state of perfect and ineffible natural harmony) for eating from the tree of the "Knowledge of Good and Evil" (gaining sentience through our evolving brains and become Directors rather than Actors).
Note I'm not actually a religious person but this is certainly an strong story in the collective psyche of a large part of the human population alive today so it's not to be ignored.
Secondly to DanI-S I would say that the "connection" you're referring to here is the "cerebral" connection, or interconnection, illustrated by the burgeoning information economy in the story, and not a physical or emotional connection, illustrated by the "grass on the toes".
"At 120: less than 3% of respondents under thirty do not have “at least some” of their emotions digitally regulated."
I live in 2011, where more than a third of the population has been exposed to chemical anti-depressants. I can think of arguments against chemical anti-depressants, but I can not think of arguments against the overall goal of helping people with depression. There is the larger goal, too, of helping people manage with their lives, and all of the emotions, some quite painful, they must face.