Cybersilliness

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at oregon.uoregon.edu
Sat Oct 21 13:20:07 PDT 2000


On Sat, 21 Oct 2000, Christopher Susi wrote:


> planet). Should I care or not? On the one hand, you'd have to be a
> "monster" to watch a 'feed-the-children' advertisement and not feel some
> form of emotion at the images of children starving to death. On the other
> hand, there is another part that says "This is life in it's rawest grittiest
> form. This has happened for hundreds of millions of years, and will likely
> continue to happen in one form or another for another hundred million years
> or more." Who am I to change that process?

"Will likely"? How do you know? There's nothing natural about starving kids, or watching images broadcast by feel-good, do-nothing charities in an effort to guilt-trip us, or even the revulsion we feel at being manipulated by such images in the media. Social history can *feel* like natural history, but it isn't.

As for cyborgs -- they're already here. Every 1st world citizen is a highly engineered product of nutritional science, medicine, education, technology, etc. And we already have intelligent AIs with powerful neural networks, voice-recognition capability and olfactory detection systems: just ask any dog-owner.

-- Dennis



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