“Eventually…[humans] will be in machines and vice versa…If your Facebook page continues to operate after you die, in some sense you are immortal. These kinds of things will continue to become bigger and bigger.”
———Peter Nowak, Well on our way to merging with machines
Technology, technology, and more technology. As the technological innovation and advances flood the market, consumers are constantly changing the style of the products and the efficiency of the product that they use at school and during work. Nowak’s blog post concerns about the future, and it is interesting how he sounds more like a sociologists rather than a business analyst in this blog post. Nowak considers about the threat that technologies could potentially have in people’s lives, and warns us that too much technology may detriment, rather than improve the living standard of the society.
As we as consumers embrace the technological changes, and craves on the benefit brought by internet, lighter computers, and smart phones, Nowak demonstrates his concern about the overdependence on technology and the tragic effect this may have on the mankind. The article mentioned about “Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of a technological singularity, [who believes] that humans and machines will merge [in the future].” At first, this comments seems to be funny and weird, however, if we look carefully at the existing technologies, we could see that Kurzweil is perfectly serious in this comment. The article mentions about producing chips for computers that could store information and different programs that will improve the efficiency of the product. However, I feel that Nowak is implying that business might be able to produce chips that can be directly planted in the brain of humans in the future, and turn us into an alive computer. This idea may appear to be fascinating at first, as the capacity of human brain could be significantly increased. Nevertheless, this is likely to raise ethical issues because if this situation becomes true, human beings will be controlled and governed by the chip, which may be connected to another machine. It is true that numerous, highly profitable business opportunities are associated with the enhancement of technology, like the chip example given above; but the merge between human and machine is just too creepy and horrifying to imagine.
If, just if, there is a merge between human beings and machine in the future, I will not want to know what it is like. Currently, we could see these hybrids in fiction movies, and we title these people as “monsters”, or other negative terms. However, if the merge become a norm, will normal human beings become outcasts? After all, the issue raised by Nowak will be boiled down to ethics and values, which are subjected to changes. Will human merge with machines in the future? No one knows.
URL:
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/blog/tech/104427–well-on-our-way-to-merging-with-machines
URL Pictures:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/engineering-senses.html
http://www.activistpost.com/2012/02/merging-man-and-machine-singularity-vs.html
http://www.sentientdevelopments.com/2009/03/kurzweil-when-minds-merge-with-machines.html