ManChine: How Integrated Are We?

Between calendaring, texting, IMing, Googling, Bloggering, Facebooking, Linking (using LinkedIn), Twittering...planning, engrossing myself in either fleeting experimentation with ideological fantasies or mundane existence, and reveling in public broadcasts across the ether, I often forget to reflect on the purpose and repercussions of my actions both in the short-term and years from now. From time to time someone or something reminds me take a reality check. This time it was Bill Joy's moving TEDTalk, and prior Wired article where he said the following:

"What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."

Everything in this world has an inherent structure. Everything structure coexists with others in a set of dynamic systems. Widely inconceivable before the dawn of the computing era in the 17th Century, humanity has dedicated significant resources and attention to self-empowerment both by creating mechanical and, more so today, digital extensions of ourselves in addition to expanding our cognitive power. Bill's detail of the elitist control over the world's technology was both enlightening and reminiscent of 1984 - my birth year! This revelation led me to jot down a few still unanswered questions:

• Will Barack Obama's charge to technologically revamp U.S. and global government lead to greater accountability or subversion of democracy?
• As brainpower becomes increasingly critical, who determines the benchmark of normality? What happens to those who fall short? Do they have ANY worth? Will we continue to subsidize the mentally handicapped or do we place more stress on genetically eradicating unfavorable mutations?
• Are technological advancements part of natural selection? How far reaching is the impact of technology on natural selection? 
• Given the sophistication of U.S. prisons and eCommerce, why do we still pay people to occupy toll booths? Imagine EZ Pass booths either overseen by a single sniper tower or squeezed between two sheer ledges. That's efficiency.

Only time will tell. Share your thoughts.