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Why Teme is (Potentially) Very Scary
Submitted by Katherine Freeman (not verified) on Sat, 05/30/2009 - 00:44
PLEASE ENJOY THIS NOW.
When I was in high school, I thought that George Orwell was a genius. But now I kind of think that Alduous Huxley is the more insightful one. And that's why I'm scared of Teme.
I think that right now, above nuclear war or asteroids or the swine flu, the greatest threats to humanity as we know it are self check-out and the Amazon Kindle. And that's because they both are working to destroy what makes us really human. Self check-out is essentially replacing a human with a machine. And while that may seem attractive for varoius reasons, it's really taking away basic human interactions in our lives. And with the rise of the Intenet, that's quite a problem. A lot of Amazonian tribes (Amazon as in the river, not the giant women) believe that humans, animals, spirits, nature--they all have the samey soul; the only difference is our bodies. Their cultures really focus on the importance of physicality. I watched a video once of two men about to fight. They were walking circles around each other, staring each other down, and the rest of the village was gathered around them, watching and crying out. And every once in a while, a woman would run up to a man and start rubbing her hands down his arms and whispering to him. They were rubbing the anger away. And it's the physicality of it that makes it work. Now while I realize that our entire outlooks on the world are very fundamentally different, I think that to some extent we can apply this to ourselves. With technology advancing at the rate that it is, it's of the upmost importance that we maintain the authentic human interactions that make us human.
So while self check-out is replacing people with machines, the Amazon Kindle is doing the same thing to art. Except it's also flattening it. If you've never heard of the Kindle, this is it. It basically takes unique pieces of literature bound as their own entities and reduces them to generic words appearing on the screen. And while this may not seem threatening, they key is what this can lead to. If individual and specific books are reduced and confined to a flat screen, what can this mean for other types of art? Will the real Mona Lisa lose its beauty to pixelated copies on computer screens? I think that art is one of the things that makes us human. And technology can kill that.
Ok, so how does this all relate to Orwell and Huxley?
Like I said before, I think that Huxley is right. We love technology, and technology is going to "kill" us; it's going to make us not human.
And how does this relate to Teme?
What scares me about Teme is its potentiial. If Teme is focusing its research on computational biology and other types of sciences, it can easily be promoting the technology that's going to propose us. I'm scared that Teme is going to only focus on research in the sciences. And I think that it's completely necessary to avoid that. Teme needs to also focus its research on humanities and the arts. And if it's able to do this, then I think that Teme can be a good thing. Teme needs to do more than bring about the SINGULARITY. So please do that!
So for now, listen to the song "Citizens of Tomorow" by The Tokyo Police Club on http://listen.grooveshark.com (which is an awesome example of how technology can work with art in a good way!) and enjoy this painting by Hieronymous Bosch called "Garden of Earthly Delights" (1503-1504).
humans, animals, spirits - oh my
"humans, animals, spirits, nature--they all have the same soul; the only difference is our bodies".
Arguably, in science the soul is now "converging" much like how technology converges at creations such as the iPhone. Many theorize that animals are essentially organic robots, while others venture further to say we even may be advanced robots. I personally think it's next to impossible to define the soul. But I do think that technology could be considered with "humans, animals, spirits, nature" because it is created by humans and is therefore a part of nature. A turtle's impulse to eat is not much different than a computer's will to find data when one considers basic cause and effect. Could future 'self-checkout' machines not be more complicated, and in this sense perhaps have a soul?
Hypothetically, if Kurweil's predictions are anywhere close, then we will have 'human-like' self-checkout machines possibly within the next twenty years (depending on how optimistic/pessimistic you are). I say we turn the debate to finding the soul.
Nice first post.
"I personally think it's next to impossible to define the soul."
Perhaps I'm just being contradictory, but how can you say this? Granted, by acknowledging that you 'personally think' it's impossible, you acknowledge the validity of the opposing view.
I merely wonder, why cannot you both be right? And wrong?
What if we can define the soul, but at the same time cannot? What if, though we draw both squares and circles, we cannot draw a square from only radially framed tools? We can certainly circumscribe a circle with a protractor? Maybe it's all a matter of how you frame the soul? Maybe it's all a matter of how you frame framing?
Irrespective of the answers to the above, I still suspect you are wrong, simply because in the history of our species, while what we imagine may not always be actualized, we eventually attain the power to actualize it.