RDH - Humankind, Never Entirely Comfortable on This Planet, Hands Over Ever Larger Portions of Life to the Computer

Humankind, Never Entirely Comfortable on This Planet, Hands Over Ever Larger Portions of Life to the Computer

April 14, 2007

The telephone was the first modern device to inhabit everyday life. The thing that makes it modern is so obvious as to barely merit consideration: it allows you to be in two or more places at once.*

The next modern device was the radio. Now anyone could listen in on total strangers from anywhere in the world, even in the dark. And thanks to the fact that sound is physical, not only could it be carried, it could be preserved. This allowed us to begin to listen to our past.

The next-to-last modern device to be introduced into human lives was the television, which could just as easily have been called the picture radio. And of course there's also a physical aspect to light—whose photoreactive effects allow images, like sound, to be captured and preserved.

The very last piece in the puzzle of modernity was put into place with the advent of the programmable electronic calculating machine (i.e., computer) in the 1940s. The significance of this development is that sound and images can be turned into pure data and stored as such indefinitely. One day we would be able to watch The Six Million Dollar Man on the same device that tells us that Lee Majors was born more than two years before Pearl Harbor was attacked and that, in today's dollars, he might be called, according to a leading index, the Twenty-three Million Dollar Man—something you could share with your aunt or your brother on that self-same device.

Meanwhile, human beings are rather helpless and the idea of bionics remains the stuff of science fiction. We devise air bags and traction control, but if our vehicles come into contact with immovable objects at sufficient speed—even on mild, cloudless days with nothing more threatening than a light, pleasant breeze—we invariably get squashed, just like any ordinary housefly that finds itself squarely smacked by a rolled-up newspaper.

Furthermore, when humans mate or eat or use the bathroom, we make messes. Sometimes, of course, our gadgets can help us to get what we want. And pizza delivery—which generally depends on some form of data transmission—has made preparing dinner a snap. But we'll still end up making a mess and there's no way around it.

Fortunately, if modern devices can't take away our problems, they can, on the other hand, take us away from them. Our gadgets are, in fact, quite good at this—far better than we ourselves are, as you should see from the following performance chart.

	GADGETS	HUMANS
Speed	Gadgets become faster every time you turn around, thanks to a doubling of transistor density every two years.	Using the mile as a benchmark, human beings have become about 7 percent faster in the last half century; there has been no improvement, however, since 1999.
Memory	Gadgets gain more memory every year; the typical gadget can remember, word for word, every book it's ever downloaded, which is more than even Harold Bloom can say.	Memory has become less important to human beings as the storage and retrieval of data from machines becomes easier with each passing year.
Insurance	Most gadgets obtained from a legitimate retailer can be insured against accidents and fully repaired or replaced as needed; the repaired or replaced item is often better than the original.	Human beings who live in reasonably developed countries can insure themselves against accidents and illnesses; various body parts can be replaced as needed, but the results will never be "good as new"; some children are superior to their parents, but many are not.
Style	Each year, gadgets tend to become more sleek and stylish than ever before.	Style is highly variable across all periods of history and depends greatly on youth, wealth, looks, and hair; gradual weight gain among wealthy populations in the last half century has been somewhat detrimental in this regard.
Networking	Most gadgets can network twenty-four hours a day, assuming a reliable power source.	Humans can network with each other, but often only with the help of considerable tact and diplomacy.
Liability	Most any action on a gadget can be undone or erased.	Humans can undo some actions, but often only after considerable apologizing or repair work or community service or jail time.
Talent	Gadgets can show Oscar-winning movies and play every genre of music with equal aplomb; they also have the capacity for displaying old television shows and are fluent in all languages and can offer many millions of hours of reading material; gadgets are notoriously poor, however, at dancing.	Humans can play some music, depending on talent and training, and, though most of us are poor mimics, we can more or less learn to role-play or to speak more than one language; basic reading and writing is mastered by many; some learn to dance with grace and style.
Gustation	Gadgets can't enjoy food.	For humans, food is a solace and a balm.
Libation	Gadgets can't become intoxicated.	Humans are easily intoxicated.

So much for some of the major differences. It should be clear, in any case, that computer-enhanced technologies have a leg up on human beings in most areas. We should be careful, as much as we admire our intelligent counterparts, not to conflate our own prospects with theirs.

*Smoke signals, which transmit disembodied human ideas, are too limited in their range to be considered truly modern. Consider that when a castaway sees a ship on the horizon, the ship is in a real sense transported into the castaway's brain, thanks to the optic nerves, but even prehistoric man could manage that trick, to say nothing of many animals.