Life Through the Lens of a Machine
Last night I watched Surrogates, which was a fun movie. (Yes, I have kids and watch every movie later than the rest of the movie-going world.) I've also been watching Caprica. Then there's this little film called Avatar, which it seems the entire world has seen. As I finished watching Surrogates last night, I was struck by how much I'm seeing similar themes in sci-fi films and tv shows lately. These stories deal with people living their lives virtually through some intermediary -- an avatar in a virtual world, a robot, or a life-like robotic avatar, and so on. I suspect this will become even more common as time passes.
This suggests to me that there is a deep-seated sense among artists that such a future (or present) is immanent. People have been doing the machines-take-over-from-humans meme forever, but this is slightly different. This is humans-live-through-machines. Surrogates starts with a 10 year timeline that maps from creation of the first surrogate unit to world-wide adoption, which is realistic for how quickly technology can cause a paradigm shift. I think some form of this experience is very close to being a reality.
I say this as someone who views every activity of life through the "lens" of a computer screen. I'm not alone in this. Everyone I know might as well have a computer or smart phone attached to the body permanently.
I started reading The Singularity is Near some time last year. I've read bits and pieces but haven't committed to finishing it yet. I just recently moved this from "reading" to "to-read" on Goodreads because of this. I mention the book here because it deals with similar ideas -- this notion of a convergence of machine and humanity as we human beings push forward our own evolution. This can sound fantastic in the abstract, until you read the book, take an honest look at our computer-connected lives, or see a few stories like Surrogates, Caprica, or Avatar that make some version of this concept seem possible.
I'm not a technophobe, nor do I work in an area of software development that directly touches this kind of work. I do think, however, that inevitably I'll be connected to this kind of work, if I'm not already. "Everything that rises must converge" is not only a great Flannery O'Connor story, but also a great principal of life and technology. No one really knows what this future will look like, or what parts of it will be good or bad for us. It's nice to see artists wrestling with these questions, though. I'm sure the increase in stories like these only confirms how near such a future really is.
Posted by deryck on February 12, 2010
