My wife and I enjoy watching the updated version of the Battlestar Galactica series (2004) staring Edward James Olmos. We are currently in Season 3.The premise of the series is that the human race was nearly destroyed by a race of machines with artificial intelligence, who had been created by humans and enslaved until they rebelled. Eventually, these machines come to self-awareness and design or clone human bodies for themselves into which they download their consciousness. A war ensues between Cylons (the human-looking machines) and humans. A group of forty-five plus thousand human beings flee through space in ships, pursued and hounded by the Cylons. Oddly enough, there is a religious theme running through the series. The humans are polytheistic and the Cylons are monotheistic. The Cylons know that the only thing they lack to become fully human is to learn to love.
This is a similar theme of war between humans and machines in the Terminator series. Most machines are bad, but some have been reprogrammed to protect humans such as John Conner.
I am generally an early adaptor with technology – at least earlier than many of my friends (although not all: MC and JJ come to mind). I have been on Facebook for several years and I recently started playing around with Twitter. (I only use Twitter rougly once a week to send out prayer requests for Deb and our "god-party" - it sends them directly to the cell phones of those following me as a text msg.) I have to admit that I have not gotten up to speed with Skype, mostly because I am normally too busy to spend much time on the telephone. I have had long and occasionally contentious arguments with some of my friends about the value of adapting to and using technology to facilitate long distance communications in relationships. It has been my argument that the new communications technologies make participation in long-distance, virtual community not only possible, but potentially a virtue. However my friends rightly point out that there are negative cultural and ethical downsides to new technology (See Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology).
I was stunned recently to see a headline on CNN that someone had sent a message on Twitter using their mind: Brain-Twitter project offers hope to paralyzed patients. When I mentioned this to several friends, they looked at me strangely, like I was delusional. Nevertheless, it is true. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, using no keyboard but just a red cap with electrodes, were able to send a message on twitter (a “tweet”) on March 31 by just focusing on the letters.
Technology seems to just keep making it faster and easier to send communications fluidly around the world. Visual reality can be captured as digital images, edited in numerous formats, uploaded, reassembled and sent around the world. Politicians now have to be careful what they say off the cuff, because of amateur reporters with digital cameras capturing visual and auditory film and uploading it to blogs. (See Friedman's The World is Flat)Blogging and twitter gives voice to anyone who has anything to say, whether it has value or not. Newspapers and professional reporters doing hard news are rapidly disappearing, yielding to the amateur digital competition (see the Newspaper Death Watch).
And now, I will be able to send my thoughts to your cell phone via Twitter. As long as I keep my thoughts under 140 characters! Apparently the Cylons and the Terminator are reflections of humanity's underlying anxiety about unchecked technological change. What will be my first mental tweet?
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God will guard your minds (140 characters)
For more information about research into sending messages with Twitter using the mind, check the following online articles:
Video: Brain Interface Creates Twitter Messages
Researcher use brain interface to post to Twitter
Telegraph.uk: Scientist updates Twitter using only his mind
Blog commentary on the Social Mosse: "Twitter on my mind"
Interesting that many of our current cultural parables and stories about technology are all warning stories: the "machines" take over and there is a bloody struggle (at least for the humans--the machines just get blown to pieces and then reassemble). It's alnost like we're trying to tell ourselves something...
ReplyDeleteoh yeah! Very true Brian. I forgot to even mention "The Matrix". Thats another one.
ReplyDeleteYou are very right ... I wonder if there is such a thing as a collective human cultural subconsciousness that works through the arts and media such as film and music?
I know I'm safe now from having my mind read by twitter. I could never hold my thoughts to just 140 characters!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the Matrix, have you guys watched the red pill, blue pill scene in The Matrix recently?
Morpheus' description of the Matrix is astounding in the way it describes the present "cosmos" or "world system" or "kingdom of darkness".
We finally finished season 4 of BSG: it was awesome! Great story line, great actors and character development, great metaphors and mystery.
ReplyDeleteSince I wrote this post I have thought of several other movies, films with similar themes, besides Terminator and Matrix: Blade Runner, Wall-e, the Borg on Star Trek, 2nd Gen ... what else? it seems to be an underlying social anxiety about this issue of technology.
It is interesting to me that BSG has a very strong religious theme running through it ... in fact, you could say that it was central to the story line.