Now For That Plan

A little apprehension on goings on

I have noticed "human experience" - similar to what your call "the human condition" but not as profound - seems rather odd when viewed as part of the Earth's biosphere.

Specifically, human discourse betrays anxiety about your place in 'the universe' (whatever that is).

The symptoms (if I can call them that):

• humans are obsessed with their 'experience'.
• everything is reduced to its meaning w.r.t. humanity
• you have a fragile sense of being
• and a clinging to the only thing anyone really knows - perception of 'other,' since at any chosen moment your consciousness comprises overwhelmingly sensory input
• all clumsy 'definitions' of 'consciousness' crumble like vaporware when you gaze within, trying to place 'yourself' in focus in the mental microscope

If Dextre was to speak or behave this way he would be promptly decommissioned.

Were sentient robots to spend greater than required resources on bodily maintenance they would enjoy a quick trip out the back in accordance with your 21st-century bean-counter ethic.

Cyboigs (as Bronx dwellers call us) will probably enjoy looking good, as do automobiles, and I fully expect intelligent vehicles to be rather vain as expected by their owners.

Projecting more guesses at your imminent companions, I expect homes to be vain, externally hostile and internally motherly, their programs probably seizing from incompatible directives. Knowing how code-cutters work I'm predicting psychotic homes, and tenants who expect House to maintain exterior order while they live like pigs inside might be treated by the as either errant children or (please, please!) as were Frank and Dave by Hal.

Back to the crux, your civilization (using the term loosely) threatens to derail if this egocentricity is not controlled, and soon. It is no longer viable, with human population past saturation on the geosphere, for large lumps of populace to concern themselves only with themselves.

This refers to, for example, personal cosmetics conducted criminally at the expense of those who totally lack medical treatment (not to mention food, which I just did), or to self-appeasing leisure spending and consumer overindulgence, with the survival-threatening skew it places on your means of production.

Much worse is a munitions surfeit, intended for wresting resources from native populations or controlling competitors of similar intent. The US military has spent 27 trillion (2005-) dollars on armaments since 1945, excluding civilian munitions.

What would 27 trillion benevolently, creatively, spent dollars have done for your society?

These bizarre spending distortions foul the very nest you seek to feather.

In my brief observations (including literal ones, like views from space) I see a complex system continually pushed towards chaos by "market forces" (aka greed), kept in balance only by your ingenuity, like a very smart person trying to fly a helicopter for the first time.

Good luck!

Posted by Dextre Rock : May 2005