I, Cyborg: Ghosts In The Machine
We couldn't work out whether this was art or science or both. Either way, here's a cyborganic spine. Courtesy of http://alexiumz.deviantart.com/
Enter our transformation. Rather than stay behind and suffer all the above we turn proactive. We evolve with our surroundings and fit in to what we have been developing all along. We become the artificial intelligence we have been creating. We become parts of it, head components, agents invocateurs who drive the machine template from our tailor-made pod environments, our blood-brain barrier safety. We have a future again, bright and promising and atop the peak we have been occupying so long. No need to fall from grace again.
Still, humanity as we know it will cease to exist. We will be something different to what we are now, parts of an organism we have only just begun to understand and get our mind around. Life as we know it will end.
Yet if one takes a moment to look around, it’s obvious that the same applies if we stay our current course: our rampant development is indicative of a dangerous tilt in the equilibrium of this planet that may bring forth the end of our species all the same.
Where does that leave us? To put it bluntly, in need of a crash course in survival.
With no teachers to deliver the lesson, we have a problem. We have to write up the course we are trying to pass, do it in a way that makes sense, question ourselves on it, and then apply and implement the damn thing.
In theory the answer is simple. Ideally, we cleanse the planet in a jiffy and start afresh with green technology and no compulsions to outdo each other in ways that harm the environment or burden the global dynamic.
In practical terms things are more complicated than that. We are faced with tough choices. We are curious beings whose innovativeness depends on competition. We are restless and resourceful. We are inside looking out, into the great unknown, in possession of tools that will help us get there, traverse the cosmic oceans to worlds beyond our own. To do so we have to bite the bullet and adjust to the toxic surroundings our technological legacy affords us – that is if we are to live as both knowledgeable as well as advanced creatures.
Image Courtesy of http://finkaboutit.com/
In other words, we have to adapt.
We have to fit in.
It’s time we woke up. We better listen to the tune we have been playing all this time. The piper has reached the gates of dawn and is taking a leap into the next day. We need to get our mind around how much we’ve already changed the global environment’s dynamic and acknowledge our actions, face the music, take a deep breath and throw ourselves back into the system. We need to do all this now. We need to do it not with the self-hating, anti-technological fervor that is so popular lately, but with cautionary imagination. We can’t take breathing masks and homeopathy to a paradigm shift anymore. We can’t meditate our way through our impasse, nor positive-think our course into the future with hugs, smiles and organic food supplies. We have to arm up. It’s time we bend with the wind and shift with the paradigm. Our organic biotechnology needs to be exposed to the miracles of the “artificial” to create a new species that will be able to survive and thrive in this new, increasingly inorganic, progressively advancing environment – and it needs to do so via intelligent biology-technology-barriers, interfaces that will control the flow of material between the two systems to protect the vulnerable flesh from the abrasive science – the “threatening” innovation from the “threatened” establishment – the spirited carbon from the inspired silicon. It’s the only way to survive the technology we are building and live up to the knowledge we are amassing, to the way of life we have been developing.
Carefully calibrated, intelligence-interfaced, pure and simple Cyborganic life seems to be the next step in terrestrial evolution. A super-organism by our standards – but a neophyte in all practical terms, rudimentary and incomplete. The process is underway and a new form of life is being born out of the vestiges of an old one. It will be a long way to Tippereri, but once there we will wonder what on earth all the fuss was about. In the meantime, if we play it right we will end up in a position of greater safety, comfort and power. We will be the driving agents of this organism. We will be the ghosts in the machine. Some would call this an inspirational prospect.
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