Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
We are Being Pulled Into the Matrix Like Never Before
Old-Thinker News | Feb 8, 2013
By Daniel Taylor
Technology has enabled modern mankind to enjoy a
lifestyle that our ancestors could only dream of. Countless numbers of science
fiction writers have warned for decades about the negative side to our
advancing technology. Every new technology invented has the capacity to be used
for the benefit or destruction of mankind. Even technologies originally
intended for good can be misused.
Could many of our society’s ills be connected to our
over dependency on technology? Is the answer, as transhumanist leader Ray
Kurzweil says, to simply merge with it? If we do, will our humanity still be
in-tact?
Let’s take a look at some statistics.
According to a 2010 LA Times report, young people
spend on average 53 hours a week watching TV, playing video games, and sitting at
the computer.
Facebook users spend about 15 hours a month on the
social networking site.
People are walking – and driving – blindly while
texting, sometimes walking into fountains and even falling off cliffs.
A literal matrix is being built around us. It hasn’t
snatched all of us up yet, but there are warning signs everywhere. The food we
eat is increasingly synthetic. Much of the news we watch has been shown to be a
total fabrication. The virtual world offers endless hours of entertainment,
pressing buttons in our brains to make us come back for more even when we don’t
want to. It even offers virtual mates that some men end up finding more
pleasurable than their real partners.
We are paying a high price for misusing technology. A
recent study from Harvard found that sperm counts in men who watched around 20
hours of TV a week were 44 percent lower than normal.
Other technologies are also impacting our bodies. A
UCLA study has shown that the internet is in fact re-wiring our brains. Dr.
Gary Small, director of UCLA’s Memory and Aging Research Center stated that, “A
young person’s brain, which is still developing, is particularly sensitive. …
It’s also the kind of brain that is most exposed to the new technology.”
The New Atlantis publication has called our
technological society an “age of egocasting.” Personalized entertainment, and
even personalized search engine results, are enabling us to engineer our
information and entertainment environments to our liking. An endless Pandora’s
box of entertainment is at our finger tips.
Within the digital world a new gold mine has been
discovered by marketing firms and advertisers. Data is the new oil of the 21st
century. They rely on internet browsers and cooperating websites to track users
activity to create detailed psychological profiles. Google has announced that
it will use microphones in personal computers and cell phones to listen for
ambient background noise. AI programs will target them with specialized ads
based on what it hears.
Futurist Gerd Leonhard spoke to technology and
business leaders in Paris last year. He warned them not to “kill the golden
goose” that is the general public willingly providing personal data. He warned
that they should not make them think that “…they are always watched by us” or
they will “kick us out.” The question is, how many people are willing to
sacrifice “convenience” for privacy? What will we do when we can “sell” our
data in the form of a retinal scan or other biometric information into our TV
for free content?
We have a great challenge ahead of us during this era
of unprecedented technological advancement. Increasingly, those who “opt out”
of this matrix will find it more difficult to function in society. A 2010
report from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense touched on this subject.
Ultimately, as stated in the paper, it may become difficult to “turn the
outside world off,” and “…Even amongst those who make an explicit life-style
choice to remain detached, choosing to be disconnected may be considered
suspicious behaviour.” Already, employers are making it clear that those
without Facebook profiles are to be deemed “suspicious.”
By 2040 – and likely before then – many futurists and
scientists are projecting that technology will have advanced exponentially,
bringing the much anticipated “singularity” closer. The MoD hints at some of
these possible developments, including the emergence of an internet of things,
radical life extension technology, and surveillance of personnel via mood
sensing devices.
Computing will become pervasive everywhere in the
environment. According to the report, “The virtual networks will consist of
communications servers linking individuals and objects, many of which will be
networked through individual Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.”
Will humanity survive?
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