Charlie's Life

Subtitle: Will technology allow our generation to replace the individual, and do we really want that?

I guess the answer to my own question would be and emphatic, “No!”. I like me. Maybe not you, but I don’t have to talk to you. Some people I really do like, but only sometimes. A limited a number of people I like all the time.

Two things I saw today are blowing my mind. One was a video I saw on HotAir.com that demonstrated to me, as if it wasn’t something we are all aware of, that we are on the verge of some serious technological leaps in the next 25 years.

As the video shows (watch it!, I can’t get it to embed), it won’t be long before we all have instant access to nearly infinite amounts of information. Imagine the implications of this for a moment. Say you’re standing the middle of the sidewalk in NYC not sure which restaurant to go to on this block. All of a sudden, user ratings start popping up in front of you along with the menu of each restaurant. You pick the Mexican place with 4 stars and the Chicken burritto. How useful would that kind of thing be?! Whoever master that will be on track to become the next Bill Gates.

This touches on the theory of the extended mind – that humans are capable of storing information in places outside of their physical mind. A few years ago, that might have been represented with something like a Rolodex or a wall calendar – an object used to store information so we didn’t have to keep it all upstairs. Now, it’s facebook or a Blackberry – things a little easier to use, more efficient and sometimes portable. With the coming technology, we will have near-universal, instantaneous access to information that we used to have to wait minutes, hours, or even days to find.

However, it’s not all great. In 25(?), 50(?), or 100(?) years when nearly all information is instantly accessible, basic social interaction could begin to break down. Picture a man in a gym trying to pick up a potential date:

“Hey, how are you?”

“Good.”

“No, you’re not. Your twitter says you were just in a car accident.”

“Oh uh, right. Well, good besides that. Want to grab some coffee after this?”

“Nah, I’m really busy later on. Have to pick up my kids from Cindy’s Daycare.”

“No you don’t. Their website says they closed an hour ago.”

“This is awkward.”

White lies are the grease that helps social interaction continue to function properly. Telling someone you’re busy later is the polite way of saying, “No, I don’t want to talk to you right now.” You don’t have to go to dinner, and the other person doesn’t feel offended. With instant access to information about everyone (where they work, who their friends are, what they did today, what they need to do tomorrow, their favorite places to go…), how will people effectively make excuses anymore?

Taken a step further, things could get really bad. If I know everything about everyone’s day before they tell me, what use is it interacting with them? The basic questions of “Hey honey, what did you do today?” won’t be relevant anymore. Small talk might become obsolete. When husband and wife get home from a long day, they won’t have anything to talk about concerning their personal lives, only things that happened externally of both of them.

To the extreme, this leads to a situation where the individual doesn’t matter any more (getting pretty far down the road here, I know). If I have instantaneous access to all the information in the world, then the information that is unique to any one person acoounts for only 0.000….0000000001% of all the information available – an infinitesimally small amount. They are practically worthless to me. If they ceased to exist, their experiences would be absorbed by the collective and everyone would move on without noticing their sudden disappearance.

Without the need to interact with another person to seek information or learn about their unique daily perspective, what value is the individual to society? We would essentially work as a hive mind. As soon as I produce something unique, it is absorbed by the system.

We would become similar to ants - a type of superorganism – where the individual only exists as part of the collective unit, not as a special, unique being, important in its own right. This is a topic explored in the book Ender’s Game with the alien species Formics (so I’m told, because I haven’t actually read it – I just wanted to acknowledge that this isn’t exactly original thought, just thought-provoking stuff). They are a hive mind and do not grasp the value of the individual and so go about massacring humans, all the while meaning no harm to any single person.

Whew! Sounds pretty dark. The question is, where does society draw the line and when? This technology will eventually be available – 20, 50, 100 years? There are certainly benefits to using it. I’d love for people to be able to conjure up information on the spot in a whole number of situations. A surgeon is deep into an operation when something goes wrong and there isn’t time to wait for another doctor to arrive. Bing! The computer overlays the new instructions on the patient on the table and the doctor is able to cautiously, but safely, proceed.

I don’t want everyone to know everything about me, and neither do most people. But, I would like to know more about the people around me, and so does everyone else. Eventually, we will all be using technology that allows us to do so, all the while wishing people weren’t checking everything I say while I talk to them.

We can’t really regulate it, either. There will be hacks, apps, and leaks that allow people to find what they want even if we ban it in the open markets. Do we let children use this stuff? I have this feeling that it wouldn’t be right, but I also don’t want my kid to be falling behind in school or the workplace because they didn’t have an omniscient brain implant. Do 5 year-olds get them? 3 year-olds? At birth?

How can we control what they access? What if they outsmart us? How do we control for errors, malfunctions, and system failures?

I think I’m about done here.

The other thing I saw today were a number of studies done on our generation. They all concluded that we have limited interest in privacy, and are hyper-team-oriented. God help us. I can’t wait for this technology, but we need to decide as a society and as individuals how to handle its existence.