I'm in a blackout. I have electricity,
I'm fine. Fridge is cold, I even have the air conditioning on, it's
July 5, 2017 3:45 pm pacific time, Planet Earth. It's hot, 34 degrees
Celsius. (Figure it out, America.) I'm in a blackout because I have
no internet. A few years ago, count them on one hand, being without
the internet would have been a minor inconvenience, now it's a
fucking catastrophe.
I can't access my cloud, Alexa and My
Google have become useless. There goes all my entertainment,
information access, past, present and future. I can't invoice for my
writing, I can't submit this essay. I can't trade the markets. (Yes,
I trade, two hours a day every morning. No I'm not rich. I have no
secret trick to sell you. I write, trade and work a day job.) Oh, I
can't access the emails I require to do that day job, so no day job
either.
Except, that's not really true because
I can get email, the internet and therefore access to everything with
my cell phone. But not without using up precious, expensive data. My
wife and I eek out our meagre mobile cyber experience with only two
gigs of data shared between us, per month. This is enough, with our
Pixels plugged into Mother Google, for them to still constantly be
surprising us. "So," asks the phone, "what did you
think of that Hamburger you just ate?"
Granted, I have invited all this into
my life. I am a technophile of sorts. I don't go to extremes, I'm not
rich by Western standards, so I don't have everything that's out
there. But I speak to machines who talk back to me everyday. I go to
McDonalds, eat that hamburger and allow Google to know exactly where
I am, what I am doing. Wifi, internet, satellites, GPS, these things,
at least plus me plus phone equals my datasphere.
Even ordering that hamburger involves
interacting with a machine now, but don't worry because my phones
also gonna say, (you have to imagine my phone with a Californian
accent,) "Hey Dumbass, you only took 987 steps today, you better
get walking, cuz you just ate, like a thousand calories." I
don't mind, but maybe you do? Maybe you think it's intrusive. You can
turn it off, as I originally had. "I don't need Google
organizing all my shit for me!" This if fine, but I found, as
you may too, that if you want to use certain features, it's a lot
easier to just turn them all on.
Your permissions don't much matter,
because it's not going to be very long before such technologies, or
rather the use of such technologies becomes obligatory. The world of
the future, provided things proceed unhindered by needless damages,
will be one of increased time getting up close and personal with
technology. This does not bother me. Put me in a cyborg, as soon as
they're ready. Plug me into the Matrix, I'll be a head in a jar,
whatever. (Maybe not the Beta versions.) My wife, not so much. She's
afeared that the non-flesh is unnatural, perhaps faulty. Maybe she's
right, certainly at first...Perhaps you side one way or the other.
This too, isn't going to matter in the
end. That future, always ahead of us, a dream until we make it a
reality, will continue to be obligated to grow, working toward
increased time spent becoming technology. I for one will welcome our
new Robot paradigm, it is the opportunity for the continued potential
of consciousness, namely mine, but also on a grander scale. Even if I
didn't, we're all going to turn around and cars will be driving us,
we'll all blink and be out of a manufacturing job, we'll all take a
breath to discover there's no longer a need.
It's just a question of time. I think
it more likely that Artificial Intelligence will be a transferred
person before a created person. Once we can do that, put a person, a
real consciousness inside a machine, any machine can be anybody,
nobody, everybody. We can copy, paste, edit. All bets are off.
Then
it becomes a question of who is keeping the power on?
If you're reading this I've escaped my
blackout.
