There are really three choices in how to live with technology. One is to fuss with it, which is what we are doing now. We laugh at the old photos of people carrying the brick-like first generation of cell phones, but soon enough people will be laughing at pictures of us, standing around like zombies with bad posture, staring at or thumbing our hand-size video screens. We are currently in the stage of pretending there is more interesting stuff inside the phone than there is. We can continue in this stage until we need neck surgery.
The other thing we’re doing is looking at those little screens while driving and running over people and killing them. Here technology is offering an answer, and it is choice #2. Get the technology out of sight. The robot car, or driving toaster, is technology that does its job without need for a lot of showy involvement on our part. The Google car will do all the work. You will not need a speedy thumb or a forward-projecting neck to use it.
Choice number three, of course, comes with the Singularity, when computers become as smart as us and we start to physically merge with them. The choice here is the merging part. Computers will soon enough be smarter than us, and there’s no stopping that. But we don’t necessarily need to merge with them, because we don’t need to be any smarter. What we need is to be wiser, and computers aren’t going to help with that, AT ALL. One response might be to turn away from technology altogether. Another choice might be to hide it so successfully that we can enjoy its benefits and still interact with each other like human beings.
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