This cartoon sums it up. Digital (mechanical) or Natural (organic)? We are the ones who decide.
Question: What about “transhumanism”? My response: It’s either a part of digital or it’s an attempt to fudge the boundary between digital and natural. (And this polarity is important to maintain.) The “virtual reality” that we set up to imitate nature — foolishly thinking we can make her predictable and thus control and dominate her — is what renders “transhumanism” so creepy to those of us who still inhabit our original body/mind/spirit vessels on this beautiful planet Earth.
P.S. I just watched The Imitation Game last night, about Alan Turing, and his Turing Machine, arguably the first computer, designed to make a code that could break the code of the Germans during World War II. So we have now, the ongoing, and accelerating drama of unintended consequences . . .
P.P.S. The father of my deceased husband Jeff, Amos Joel, happened to be the inventor of the cell phone. Worked for Bell Labs (AT&T). Years after cell phones were introduced, Jeff and I finally got one for our yurt in Jackson Hole — in case of medical emergency. That was back in the late 1990s. And here we are not even 20 years later and everybody and his donkey has a cell phone! Talk about unintended consequences! Or maybe they were intended. Not by Amos, I don’t think. He just loved to tinker and invent, driven by the same passion as Alan Turing.
