A Ramble About the Future. Also, Dresden Codak.

You Tube - Amber Case - Prosthetic Culture

This might get a little odd. Stay with me.

The above link goes to a very interesting video I saw today. I discovered it through Twitter, thanks to webcomic artist Aaron Diaz/Dresden Codak. Diaz' comic is a love ode to Transhumanism, particularly the flavor of transhumanism that involves merging with Artificial Intelligence and implanting bionic ...stuff onto our bodies. Its an idea that began in science fiction (particularly the Cyberpunk sci-fi stories popular in the 80s and early 90s. One tenant of transhumanism that you might be familiar with is the practice of cryogenically freezing your body (or just your head if you're on the budget plan for immortality), and waiting until SCIENCE is able to cure whatever you had and reconstruct your body.

Futurists like Ray Kurzweil, and presumably Aaron Diaz, believe that the transhuman shift, or as they call it, The Singularity, will occur sometime before the current generation hits old age. This would be cool, except that its already started, as Amber Case points out in her lecture.

Basically, Case argues that we're all already cybernetic organisms (cyborgs, if you're feeling clever).  She says the current reliance we have on our electronic gadgets has turned us into "low-tech cyborgs" that aren't connected all the time. Case calls herself a "Cyborg Anthropologist" who studies the incredibly strange world we're living in now. She likens the use of cell phones to augment our ears, and cars to augment our legs, to the prehistoric use of tools - she uses the hammer as an example of augmenting the fist.

I consider myself an amateur student of this sort of thing. Part of that comes from all the cyberpunk I've read over the years, especially the latter years of it, when Nanotechnology started to pop up in Neal Stephenson's books. Part of it is looking at the speed that the world is progressing. In 1967, the TV show Star Trek showed us a little black box that told its user things about his environment, and a little golden flip device that allowed communication into space and back. Now, I can pull out my BlackBerry, click to the weather, look at a GPS map of the streets I'm on, and then call my friends and tell them that the Horta is killing the miners because they were stealing its eggs.

I'm not saying that I'm particularly eager to replace one of my arms with a Sony TechnoArm 7000 with built in USB ports, flashlight and barcode scanner, but it seems like only a matter of time before we start getting implantable Bluetooth headsets and holographic memory in our wearable laptops. I feel like I've lost the thread of what I was trying to say.

I actually have two books on transhumanism/the singularity on my bookshelf here at school. Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" and a book called "The Spike: How our Lives are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies."  Next to those, "Physics of the Impossible" challenges the singularity to make the impossible mundane.