Call me Amish

~ This article is a guest appearance by Tuffgonad

Not too long ago a computer beat humanity at Jeopardy http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/17/ibm-watson-reddit-ama/ . Now this troubles me not because I worry about Terminator or Matrix scenarios, and I don’t really mind the fact that we can be beat at Jeopardy. After all, from what I can see, most Jeopardy contestants are people who can memorize facts and useless knowledge because they have nothing better to do in their lives. But have we begun as a society and a world to give up creativity and thought. Is this the beginning of the end for us?

I am always five or six steps behind the technical world. I am not on Twitter, Facebook or many other things and this annoys several member of my family. I leave my cell phone at home a lot and that annoys my friends. I can’t text worth a dam. Have a hard time reading text because we have reduced the English letters to a few letters and to incomplete sentences. My computer is a relic perhaps dug up at some archeological dig. I have been at times been called Amish. At first it seems like an insult but after thinking about it I don’t think it such a bad thing.

In a world were things move at the speed of 1s and 0s I like my quiet contemplation. I like knowing I can solve simple problems without having to Google them. I see the generation that is growing up today and they are so dependant on technology that I wonder what would happen if the world had a massive black out for a month or so. In my head I see riots developing in a few days as the last battery life drains from the machines that have become surrogates to us for real human connection. I see others huddled in their corners having imaginary conversations on their Blackberrys with friends as imaginary as the friends they used to talk on the same devices with. I like to think that in the time after the big hysteria that the few survivors descendants would be sitting in a cave made out of an old Starbucks lit by a fire telling stories so unbelievable that they have to be myth. Stories such as the children of old could fly in the air beyond the horizon or how they had magic devices that let them talk to people they could not even see.

So will we even notice when carbon based life forms give way to silicon based life forms. It is not uncommon for me to call my car or computer stupid. But what happens when my computer or car can legitimately call me stupid? This must be how God felt when we turned away. Will computers be telling their children that we are imaginary that everything just came to be?

What will happen to irrational thought? Personally, it is my favorite type of thought. Love is irrational you do not need it to survive. We could procreate and many of us do quite well with out it and in terms of passing on your gene Oh! Yea! You’re a winner. Hell, many of us do not even have lust when it comes to sex because to have lust you have to have a lack that produces a want. And what about humor? We could live with out humor. Hell I had a former boss that certainly lived without it. She had no need for it. You would have been able to find a happier lunch lady serving a never ending line of  demon children in hell than this lady.

Maybe I should not have such a sense of sadness. Maybe in the end I will be reduced to a pet or a zoo attraction. In the zoo I guess I will be like our cousin, the monkey, drawing with poo crayons to relieve the boredom. The computers will look at me. Some in disgust and others will wonder if we even are self aware because we certainly look bored to death.