Social Engineering 2013: Learning ‘Careerism’ As A Moral Reward System

January 11, 2013 By 497 Comments

Aaron Jackson
 Waking Times
Jan 13, 2013

The concepts of consumerism and careerism are predominant in first world countries, and are increasing in countries with less “advanced” economies too, but why?

 The definition of careerism or a careerist is “the characteristics associated with one who advances his career even at the expense of his pride and dignity.” Simply looking at this definition, many of us instantly assume ‘it has nothing to do with my career’.

As children we are brought up by our parents or carers, usually with a mixture of two learning methodologies, the first of which is a reward based learning system, where a child is rewarded for doing good and, importantly, doing as they are told. The second is the opposite side of the same coin, a punishment based system, punished for disobeying and for doing bad. In general, parents try to give children the best morals and ethics that they are able to comprehend for themselves.

Watch…

However, that same parent then tells the child to do as they are told at school. The child goes to school and learns a very systematic, rigid and standardised education without much flexibility, creativity,play, freedom, and importantly, without parental guidance.  Parents tend to assume that the government’s education programmes have our children’s futures and interests at heart. Usually the teachers also believe this.

When we reach age 11/12 in the USA people are moved from Elementary school to Middle School, until 14/15 when people are moved to High School. Typically in the UK children go to Secondary School from 10/11/12 until 15/16. Why change schools, and why between 10 and 12?

Some school uniforms also represent “smart” worker clothing.

Puberty, during this time of questioning, rebelling against our parents as authority figures to find our own path, we are given alternative answers by our new schools. A lot of these school changes are careerist ideologies, once we reach these ages we are taught that we need to get the grades to get a job because having a job is successful; the better the grades, the better the career and pay, right?

In the USA this is pushed even farther as children must pass tests to even get to the next grade/school year, a very early way of learning a careerist promotion based system and also something that appears to be non-optional. Those who do not follow these rules are ridiculed as they are held back, just as people in society are ridiculed for having a low-paying job or no job at all.

The poor or jobless are considered by many of the rich, the media and the government to be worthless people of society who do not deserve, because they haven’t worked enough.

Even when these people volunteer to do charitable work, they are perceived as some kind of hippie scum.

It’s important to note that government taxes and bank’s debt interest are two other ways of getting something without working for it.

 All along our parents tried to teach us good morals and ethics; what is good and what is bad. Schooling takes over and teaches us that more obeying and work is good, and anything else is bad. By the time we leave school, we have learned that working is good, and money is a replacement of our parents’ reward based system.

There’s no longer a reward based system for doing good, now there is only a reward based system of working for currency by obeying. Numbers printed on paper or a computer screen. This is now where our morals are firmly based in society.

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Filed Under: 2012, America, Art, EDUCATION, Futurism, History, Media, money, WORLD NEWS Tagged With: , , ,

The ‘Great Filter’ Theory: That Humans Have Already Conquered Threat of Extinction

December 22, 2012 By 344 Comments

George Dvorsky
io9.com
 Dec 22, 0212

It’s difficult to not be pessimistic when considering humanity’s future prospects. Many people would agree that it’s more likely than not that we’ll eventually do ourselves in.

 And in fact, some astrobiologists theorize that all advanced civilizations hit the same insurmountable developmental wall we have. They call it the Great Filter. It’s a notion that’s often invoked to explain why we’ve never been visited by extraterrestrials.

But there is another possible reason for the celestial silence. Yes, the Great Filter exists, but we’ve already passed it. Here’s what this would mean. Before we can get to the Great Filter hypothesis we have to appreciate what the Fermi Paradox is telling us.


The Fermi Paradox and the Great Silence

The so-called “Great Silence” is the contradictory and counter-intuitive observation that we have yet to see any evidence for the existence of aliens. The size and age of the Universe suggests that many technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligences (ETIs) ought to exist — but this hypothesis seems inconsistent with the lack of observational evidence to support it. Despite much of what popular culture and sci-fi would lead us to believe, the fact that we haven’t been visited by ETIs is disturbing. Our galaxy is so ancient that it could have been colonized hundreds, if not thousands, of times over by now. Even the most conservative estimates show that we should have already made contact either directly or indirectly (such as from dormant Bracewell communication probes).

Some skeptics dismiss the Fermi Paradox by suggesting that ETI’s have come and gone, or that they wouldn’t find us interesting.

Unfortunately, most solutions to the FP don’t hold for a number of reasons, including the realization that a colonization wave of superintelligent aliens would likely rework the fabric of all life in the cosmos (e.g. uplifting), or that these solutions are sociological in nature (i.e. they lack scientific rigor and don’t necessarily apply to the actions of all advanced civilizations; all it would take is just one to think and behave differently — what astrobiologists refer to as the non-exclusivity problem).

There have been many attempts to resolve the Fermi Paradox, including the herculean attempt by Stephen Webb in his book, Fifty Solutions to Fermi’s Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life.

But one solution stands out from the others, mostly on account of its brute elegance: The Great Filter.


The Great Filter

Conceived in 1998 by Robin Hanson, the GF is the disturbing suggestion that there is some kind of absurdly difficult step in the evolution of life — one that precludes it from becoming interstellar. And like the immutable laws of the universe, the GF is a stumbling block that holds true across the board; if it applies here on Earth, it applies everywhere.

Many look upon the GF as evidence that we’ll destroy ourselves in the future. The basic idea is that every civilization destroys itself before developing space-faring technologies. Hence the empty cosmos. Given our own trajectory and the ominous presence of apocalyptic weapons, this scenario certainly seems plausible. We’re not even close to going interstellar, yet we’re certainly capable of self-annihilation. But that doesn’t mean this interpretation of the GF is the correct one. Rather, it’s quite possible that human civilization has already passed the Great Filter. Should this be the case, it would be exceptionally good news. Assuming there’s no other filter awaiting us in the future, it means we might be the first and only intelligent civilization in the Milky Way.

It’s a possibility, however, that demands explanation. If the filter is behind us, what was it? And how did we manage to get past it? Interestingly, there are some excellent candidates.


Rare Earth

First and foremost there’s the Rare Earth Hypothesis (REH), the suggestion that the emergence of life was extremely improbable for a confluence of reasons. The theory essentially suggests that we hit the jackpot here on Earth. This argument, which was first articulated by geologist Peter Ward and astrobiologist Donald E. Brownlee, turns the whole Copernican Principle on its head. Instead of saying that we’re nothing special or unique, the REH implies the exact opposite — that we are freakishly special and unique. What we see here on Earth in this solar system and in this part of the Galaxy may be a remarkable convergence of highly unlikely factors — factors that have resulted in a perfect storm of conditions suitable for the emergence of complex life.

It’s important to note that Ward and Brownlee are not implying that it’s one or two conditions that can explain habitability, but rather an entire array of happy accidents. For example, stars might have to be of the right kind (including adequate metallicity and safe distance from dangerous celestial objects), and planets must be in a stable orbit with a large moon. Other factors include the presence of gas giants, plate tectonics, and many others. But even with all the right conditions, life was by no means guaranteed. It’s quite possible that the Great Filter involved the next set of steps: the emergence of life and its ongoing evolution.


The improbability of life

Indeed, in addition to all the cosmological and chemical prerequisites for life, there were at least three critical stages that could all be considered candidates for the Great Filter: (1) the emergence of reproductive molecules (abiogenesis and the emergence of RNA), (2) simple single-celled life (prokaryotes), and (3) complex single-celled life (eukaryotes). Chemists and biologists are still not entirely sure how the first self-replicating molecules came into existence. Unlike its big brother, DNA, RNA is a single-stranded molecule that has a much shorter chain of nucleotides. Moreover, it usually needs DNA to reproduce itself — which would have been a problem given the absence of DNA in those early days. That said, scientists know that RNA is capable of reproducing through autocatalysis. It does this by storing information similar to DNA, which allows it to become its own catalyst (a ribosome). This so-called RNA World Modelsuggests that RNA can function as both a gene and an enzyme — a pre-DNA configuration that eventually became the basis for all life. Given that we’ve never detected life elsewhere, it’s difficult to know how difficult this initial step was. But that said, this form of life emerged super-early in the Earth’s history — about a billion years after its formation, and immediately after the cooling of rocks and the emergence of oceans. But what we do know is that the next few steps — the leap from single-celled life to complex single-celled life — was exceedingly difficult, if not highly improbable. The process of copying a genetic molecule is extremely complex, involving the perfect configuration of proteins and other cellular components.

Here’s how it likely happened: Once a self-replicating molecule emerged, the presence of RNA allowed for the formation of protobionts, a theoretic precursor to prokaryotic cells. These tightly bound bundles of organic molecules contained RNA within their membranes — which could have evolved into proper prokaryotic cells. And here’s where it gets interesting. After the formation of prokaryotes — about 3.5 billion years ago — nothing changed in the biological landscape for the next 1.8 billion years. Life in this primitive form was completely stuck. Imagine that — no evolution for almost two billion years. It was only after the endosymbiosis of multiple prokaryotes that complex single-cell life finally emerged — a change that was by no means guaranteed, and possibly unlikely.

And it’s this highly improbable step, say some scientists, that’s the Great Filter. Everything that happened afterward is a complete bonus.

Now that said, there may have been other filters as well. These could include the emergence of terrestrial organisms, hominids, and various civilizational stages, like the transition from stone age culture to agricultural to industrial. But unlike the first primordial stages already discussed, these are porous filters and not terribly unlikely.




More filters ahead?

So, if the GF is behind us, it would do much to explain the Fermi Paradox and the absence of extraterrestrial influence on the cosmos. Should that be the case, we may very well have a bright future ahead of us. The Milky Way Galaxy is literally ours for the taking, our future completely open-ended.

But before we jump to conclusions, it’s only fair to point out that we’re not out of the woods yet. There could very well be another GF in the future — one just as stingy as the filters of our past. The universe, while giving the appearance of bio-friendliness, may in reality be extremely hostile to intelligent life.

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SKYNET IS COMING: Computers will taste, smell and hear within five years, IBM predicts

December 18, 2012 By 411 Comments
21st Century Wire say… This is one step away from SKYNET ala Terminator – as these advances in artificial intelligence will be extended to the current multi-billion dollar per year drone industry, where unmanned drones will not just be chasing phantom terrorists in the hills of Afghanistan, but more likely chasing citizens within North America, Europe and elsewhere.  Washington Post Hayley Tsukayama As 2012 winds down, lots of people are looking back at the year in tech. But at IBM, researchers have released a list of trends to expect not only in 2013, but in the next five years. On Monday, the company released its annual “5 in 5” report, which offers up predictions about what technology innovations will catch on in the next half-decade. This year, the report focuses on how computers will process information in the future, and IBM’s researchers say that nature’s gift of five senses won’t be reserved for just the living: Machines may actually be able to process things as humans do — through touch, taste, sight, sound and smell. That, said IBM vice president of innovation Bernie Meyerson, would be a major shift in the very architecture of computing. “If you program a computer, it’s a gruesome undertaking,” said Meyerson, noting that — at its most basic level — the way humans load information, bit by bit, into computers, hasn’t changed since the abacus. But advances in computer technology, Meyerson said, are already allowing computers to look at an object holistically, taking in information in a moment that would have taken years to input through code. “Say you’re standing in a museum of modern art, surrounded by paintings and sculptures,” Meyerson said. “You would spend the rest of your adult life trying to put that into words and type it in [to a computer]. Now, imagine if you could teach it by just showing it something.” The idea, Meyerson said, is to give humans and computers a common language. And it’s not as difficult — or as futuristic — as you may think. Smell and taste, Meyerson said, are two senses that have a clear chemical base. If computers can sense the types of molecules — ammonia, explosive residue or gasses that indicate decay — they could alert users to different markers that would flag security risks or food-borne illnesses. The same is true of taste, he said, if computers could be programmed to recognize the correct proportions of certain chemicals. Or, the machines could be used in health planning, to find healthy combinations of foods that would appeal to the palate of the dieter. When it comes to sight, Meyerson said, researchers have improved recognition software that can identify objects based on a database of images already loaded into the system. And in the future, computers could “hear,” by using detailed sound analyses that, for example, can tie a certain pattern of notes in a baby’s cry to anguish or joy. Finally, computers could learn to tell the difference between cashmere or concrete by reading the appropriate signals of vibration and temperature, Meyerson said. Video game makers have already used a very basic version of this: controllers vibrate when there’s impact between objects on-screen. In the next five years, researchers could take that sort of program to a microscopic level, allowing machines to have some sense of touch, Meyerson said. While each idea has applications of its own across many industries, Meyerson said that they would have the greatest impact when combined. “It’s not that you want to make computers smarter than humans,” he said. “But they have bandwidth to get it in… If you want to scale its memory, you can buy a box of disk drives.”facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest
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WE ARE BORN INTO A SLAVE SYSTEM

October 15, 2012 By 14 Comments
You think we’re over exaggerating? Go and work it out for yourself… ….facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest
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Facebook in new privacy row over facial recognition feature

June 8, 2011 By 445 Comments
Social network turns on new feature to automatically identify people in photos, raising questions about privacy implications of the service - By Charles Arthur Guardian June 8, 2011 Facebook has come under fire for quietly expanding the availability of technology to automatically identify people in photos, renewing concerns about its privacy practices. The feature, which the giant social network automatically enabled for its more than 500 million users, has been expanded from the US to “most countries”, Facebook said on its official blog on Tuesday.

BIG BROTHER: Facebook hopes to get further into your personal space with new Orwellian technology.

Marc Rotenberg, president of the non-profit privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the system raised questions about which personally identifiable information, such as email addresses, would become associated with the photos in Facebook’s database. He also criticised Facebook’s decision to automatically enable the facial-recognition technology for its users. “I’m not sure that’s the setting that people would want to choose. A better option would be to let people opt-in,” he said. Internet security consultancy Sophos noted that many Facebook users had seen the facial recognition option turned on without any notice in the last few days. “Yet again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth,” commented Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos. Facebook’s “Tag Suggestions” feature uses facial recognition technology to speed up the process of labeling friends and acquaintances in photos posted on the site. Facebook has been repeatedly criticised for changing settings involving privacy and identity in favour of making more data public in ways that means its users have to opt out of, rather than opt in to, the service. Facebook, which announced in December that it planned to introduce the facial recognition service in the US, acknowledged that the feature was now more widely available. The site also said in an emailed statement that “we should have been more clear with people during the roll-out process when this became available to them”. The statement noted that the photo-tagging suggestions are only made when new photos are added to Facebook, that only friends are suggested and that users can disable the feature in their privacy settings. While other photo software and online services such as Google Inc’s Picasa and Apple Inc’s iPhoto use facial recognition technology, its use on a social network like Facebook could raise thorny privacy issues. Google has stepped away from the widespread implementation of its Google Goggles service, which would try to identify people based on facial recognition through mobile phones running its Android operating system. Instead it only uses it for translating text and identifying objects. Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, said earlier in June that he had concerns about its use with people. “We do have the relevant facial recognition technology at our disposal. But we haven’t implemented this on Google Goggles because we want to consider the privacy implications and how this feature might be added responsibly,” he said. “I’m very concerned personally about the union of mobile tracking and face recognition.” Rotenberg noted that Apple’s iPhoto software gave users control over facial recognition technology by letting them elect whether or not to use it with their personal photo collections. Facebook’s technology, by contrast, operates independently, analysing faces across a broad swathe of newly uploaded photos. Last year the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint about Facebook’s privacy practices with the US Federal Trade Commission, which Rotenberg said was still pending. He noted that he planned to take a close look at Facebook’s new announcement involving facial recognition technology. -facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest
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NASA plans asteroid mission

May 31, 2011 By 8 Comments
DPA May 30, 2011 The U.S. space agency will send an unmanned spacecraft to a nearby asteroid in 2016 and bring back a sample to provide clues about the formation of the solar system, NASA said on Wednesday. The mission known as Osiris-Rex will be the first U.S. effort to bring back a sample from an asteroid.

This undated picture made available by Lockheed Martin via NASA shows the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which will take astronauts to a distant asteroid before travelling to Mars (PHOTO: AP/NASA)

Since asteroids formed from the gas and dust that made up the sun and planets, they are considered good indicators of conditions in the early universe and can provide clues about the formation of the solar system. “This asteroid is a time capsule from the birth of our solar system and ushers in a new era of planetary exploration,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division. Osiris-Rex will travel for four years to reach the asteroid 1999 RQ36 in the year 2020. It will then spend six months mapping the surface of the asteroid, allowing scientists to determine the best spot for the craft’s robotic arm to dig a 57-gram sample. The sample will be returned to Earth in 2023, NASA said. The mission is expected to cost some 800 million dollars. A Japanese mission brought back a sample from an asteroid last year. The space agency also hopes to send astronauts to an asteroid and on Tuesday unveiled plans for a new deep space vehicle. That spacecraft now known as the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is planned to first take astronauts to a distant asteroid before travelling to Mars. This story originally appeared on The Hindu news site.facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest
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Large Hadron Collider: World’s First Time Machine Through 5th Dimension?

March 17, 2011 By 369 Comments

Before Its News March 16, 2011

If the latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is right, the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s largest atom smasher that started regular operation last year – could be the first machine capable of causing matter to travel backwards in time.

“Our theory is a long shot,” admitted Weiler, who is a physics professor at Vanderbilt University, “but it doesn’t violate any laws of physics or experimental constraints.” One of the major goals of the collider is to find the elusive Higgs boson: the particle that physicists invoke to explain why particles like protons, neutrons and electrons have mass. If the collider succeeds in producing the Higgs boson, some scientists predict that it will create a second particle, called the Higgs singlet, at the same time. According to Weiler and Ho’s theory, these singlets should have the ability to jump into an extra, fifth dimension where they can move either forward or backward in time and reappear in the future or past.

An illustration of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, located in Switzerland. CREDIT: CERN

“One of the attractive things about this approach to time travel is that it avoids all the big paradoxes,” Weiler said. “Because time travel is limited to these special particles, it is not possible for a man to travel back in time and murder one of his parents before he himself is born, for example. However, if scientists could control the production of Higgs singlets, they might be able to send messages to the past or future.” The test of the researchers’ theory will be whether the physicists monitoring the collider begin seeing Higgs singlet particles and their decay products spontaneously appearing. If they do, Weiler and Ho believe that they will have been produced by particles that travel back in time to appear before the collisions that produced them. Weiler and Ho’s theory is based on M-theory, a “theory of everything.” A small cadre of theoretical physicists have developed M-theory to the point that it can accommodate the properties of all the known subatomic particles and forces, including gravity, but it requires 10 or 11 dimensions instead of our familiar four. This has led to the suggestion that our universe may be like a four-dimensional membrane or “brane” floating in a multi-dimensional space-time called the “bulk.” According to this view, the basic building blocks of our universe are permanently stuck to the brane and so cannot travel in other dimensions. There are some exceptions, however. Some argue that gravity, for example, is weaker than other fundamental forces because it diffuses into other dimensions. Another possible exception is the proposed Higgs singlet, which responds to gravity but not to any of the other basic forces.

Illustration of singlet time travel theory. CREDIT: Jenni Ohnstad / Vanderbilt

When a pair of protons collide in the Large Hadron Collider, the resultant explosion may create a special type of particle, called a Higgs singlet, that is capable of traveling forward and back in time. It would do so by leaving familiar three-dimensional space to travel in an extra dimension. Weiler began looking at time travel six years ago to explain anomalies that had been observed in several experiments with neutrinos. Neutrinos are nicknamed ghost particles because they react so rarely with ordinary matter: Trillions of neutrinos hit our bodies every second, yet we don’t notice them because they zip through without affecting us. Weiler and colleagues Heinrich Päs and Sandip Pakvasa at the University of Hawaii came up with an explanation of the anomalies based on the existence of a hypothetical particle called the sterile neutrino. In theory, sterile neutrinos are even less detectable than regular neutrinos because they interact only with gravitational force. As a result, sterile neutrinos are another particle that is not attached to the brane and so should be capable of traveling through extra dimensions. Weiler, Päs and Pakvasa proposed that sterile neutrinos travel faster than light by taking shortcuts through extra dimensions. According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there are certain conditions where traveling faster than the speed of light is equivalent to traveling backward in time. This led the physicists into the speculative realm of time travel. Ideas impact science fiction In 2007, the researchers, along with Vanderbilt graduate fellow James Dent, posted a paper titled “Neutrino time travel” that generated a considerable amount of buzz. Their ideas found their way into two science fiction novels. Final Theory by Mark Alpert, which was described in the New York Times as a “physics-based version of The Da Vinci Code,” is based on the researchers’ idea of neutrinos taking shortcuts in extra dimensions. Joe Haldeman‘s novel The Accidental Time Machine is about a time-traveling MIT graduate student and includes an author’s note that describes the novel’s relationship to the type of time travel described by Dent, Päs, Pakvasa and Weiler.

Prof. Thomas Weiler, right, and graduate fellow Chui Man Ho. CREDIT: John Russell / Vanderbilt

Ho is a graduate fellow working with Weiler. Their theory is described in a paper posted March 7 on the research website arXiv.org.Contact and sources: University of Vanderbilt David Salisbury, (615) 322-NEWS david.salisbury@vanderbilt.edu
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Patrick Henningsen on Coast to Coast AM Radio with George Noory

March 10, 2011 By 12 Comments
21st Century Wire March 9, 2011 Listen to Patrick’s first appearance on Coast to Coast AM radio show with host George Noory. Coast to Coast AM is one of the biggest and best syndicated radio programs in the US and internationally. In this segment George Noory and Patrick discuss aspects of Facebook’s new currency, cyber security, technology, climate change, the Magna Carta, the New World Order and events in Libya… (six segment clips below)

Radio guest Patrick Henningsen is a writer, pr/communications consultant and Managing Editor at 21st Century Wire.

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WHAT IS MY RESPONSIBILITY?

January 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
21st Century Wire Jan 18, 2011    Some interesting questions, and answers, raised by philosopher Eckhart Tolle. Author Eckhart Tolle is the author of the popular series The Power of Now. He certainly has some great insights into the mental state of Western man and the politics of the mind.  facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest
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The 21st Century Matrix: Technocracy and the Rise of the Machines

August 2, 2010 By 1,328 Comments
By Patrick Henningsen
Editor
21st Century Wire
 August 2, 2010

Call it the Matrix, the Scientific Dictatorship, Transhumanism- or call it the Technocracy. No matter which name we give it, few can deny that today’s technology is advancing at an ever-increasing rapid clip, with most of us left on the sidelines playing the passive role of consumer and spectator. For ethicists and philosophers, however, it’s become a game of catch-up. So how does one navigate, let alone make sense of our new 21st century matrix?

 Technology… it is all around us. Some contend that we are literally bathing in it. Most of us spend our entire waking day inside a WiFi zone. But beyond the iPods, iPads, iPhones and the Bluetooths, further below the surface of this seemingly innocuous chapter in human evolution, there lurks a number of unseen forces and currents of change. One of these is a desire by a newly crowned technological elite or new Technocracy to impose or ‘implement’ (depending on your vantage point) an increasing amount of new and far-reaching technologies on to the population at large. What is the Technocracy? Originally, it was an early 20th century movement which fell out of public favor, but its ideas haven’t died, they’ve merely migrated into other areas of the governing class and society.

The technocrat promises a version of socialism that will deliver the people a sort of high-tech utopia, or “Brave New World“. Far from extinct, those ideas are still hanging around and this new system, or matrix is now coming into view. But this time it’s not technocrats who will be leading the revolution per say… it’s the machines themselves.

Step One: Adoption

 We have entered into a new epoch where speed and efficiency and what we expect of our machines increases with every new upgrade. If you are under the age of 30, then you probably will not remember a time when there were absolutely no cell phones, no internet, no virtual social networking and no CCTV cameras. If you are under the age of 20, then you were in effect, born into this early version of the 21st century matrix, or as Morpheus might say, ‘born into bondage’.

If this transformation were truly an organic process, then most critical minds would be able to rationalize the rise of the machines. But the evolution of technology and how we interact with it, is not so easy to keep track of.

It is more attuned to Chaos Theory than it is to Darwinian Theory. The media and its modern marketing arms tell us that it’s progress- their role is defined as the initial express vehicle on which all new ideas and advancements are delivered into the mainstream, and in many cases you could say that the public are preconditioned to accept new technology on arrival. Certainly the media is an awesome technological beast worthy of its own in-depth analysis, but we can leave it aside for now, as it has its own virtual limits and only serves as a platform from which real technological applications are successfully launched on the ground. The  key juncture in this equation is when we can touch technology, when it’s adopted in real world interactions, when it becomes our companion or even an extension of our physical self. In the end, much of our day-to-day life depends on technology, so society has had to develop a kind of  unwavering  faith in ‘it’. Some enthusiasts take things a step further, as if it’s a white buffalo, they hunt their prey, waiting from 3am for the Apple Store to open, and finally fall at the feet of their gadgets, paying homage- in effect, worshiping their machine.

Most people might even admit they talk to their cars and give them affectionate names. It’s quite a relationship we are developing with our machines.

Once the stuff of Victorian science fiction, machines embody the ultimate in man’s pursuit of technology.


The term “matrix” is one that many have become familiar over the last decade. And there is a good reason for this. The advancement of new technologies is making that allegory into a reality. The allegory of the ‘matrix’ was first introduced into the mainstream conversation with the Wachowski Brothers film, The Matrix.

The film describes a future in which reality is a computer generated construct perceived by a human population held in captivity and whose harvested  bodies’ heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source to power the machine world. Their reality is actually a simulated reality created by sentient machines in order to pacify and subdue the human race. To date, The Matrix series is one of the most powerful and poignant stories which offers an accessible, theoretical and philosophical explanation of what fundamental characteristics a technocracy or scientific dictatorship might actually have. Few will disagree that it’s a valuable metaphor for our times. So how can society begin to navigate through the 21st century matrix if it finds itself entangled in the ever sophisticated web of modern technology?

How can one determine which technology is good for us and which should be discarded?

Can we at least check its growth? First we need to understand where we came from in the hope to better know where we are heading.


Short film montage, The Robot’s Rebellion, featuring Morpheus, Neo… and David Icke.

How did we get this far?

If one is to obtain even a basic grasp of the mercurial juggernaut known as the Technocracy and its impending Scientific Dictatorship, it is crucially important to know how we got to where we are today. Just like the invention of the printing press transformed society and the advent of the automobile transformed communities, the introduction of each new technology brings forward a new set of dilemmas. The introduction of cellular phones has arguably transformed our nature and the way we operate and communicate minute to minute.

GMO’s (Genetically Modified Food and Organisms) were introduced only a few decades ago and have already devastated many of the world’s natural crops and fish stocks. Likewise, Genetic Cloning and Nanotechnology have some frightening applications which would put most imaginative horror-science fiction stories to shame.

Contemporary philosopher, filmmaker, and brilliant modern thinker Godrey Reggio was quoted as saying, “All tools have intrinsic politics and technology is the tool of now.” Reggio goes on to explain, “I think it’s the tragedy of our time that we’re not aware of the affect of the manner in which we’ve adopted tools. Those tools have become who we are… It’s not that we use technology, we live technology… it (technology) is unknowable”.

In so far as corporations are concerned, economics certainly has played its part in the rise of the machines. In a bid to save money, reduce labor costs and increase efficiency, for the past 200 years corporations have sought to streamline their operations, gaining speed in the late 19th century with industrial revolution practices like the division of labor, separation of parts, as well the incredible growth of both the military and biochemical industrial complex in the early 20th century.

Since the latter half of the 20th century, these same corporations have moved on to robotics, smart tracking and smart advertising in order to secure any possible advantage in an ever-increasing competitive global marketplace. This is for the most part motivated by achieving more competitively priced goods, returning bottom line profits which in turn increase the quarterly value of a corporation’s share prices. It’s business 101- corporations are motivated by money and controlling their markets, so we can easily track the rise of the corporation and also understand their consumer base. Throughout history, when corporations overstep the mark, consumers have boycotted the corporation’s products. That’s your Ace in the pocket. But what happens when the State is involved in the mix?

The State has become one of the biggest consumers of the products that corporations are peddling, and as you will see later, understanding its motivations can be a different matter altogether.

Rise and rise of the State

There is now a new kid on the block. One of the biggest new growth areas for big corporations is providing applications for their biggest bread and butter client- the State. In an era of fiat currencies and government deficits, unlike Joe Public, the State has an almost unlimited cheque book. For the most part, the State maintains a captive audience and has a mandate to take whatever money it needs from that audience, and giving back whatever or what little it sees fit.  One of the biggest, and surely the most expensive things the State claims to provide is “security”. And that brings us to the real rub. There is an elegant and disturbingly tango which has taken place between the State’s governing bureaucracy and a Public who has become obsessed with the need to feel hyper-secure. Using fear as an instrument of control, each party feeds off the other, and this dark dance increases in its intensity as each new technological innovation is applied to the science of people management- administered by a governing class that appears to have become high on its elaborate new toy chest.

Most of these toys are tools used for applications in the field of social engineering.

The goals of the State and its social engineers are not so much economic or bottom line driven(as in the case of corporations), they are to do with maintaining power in what has become an almost neofeudal manner. Why else would municipalities in the US and UK spend many billions on CCTV cameras and elaborate computer systems for spying on their own citizens? At such an expense to the public purse, surely there is no real money in that enterprise. So why do it then? We can begin looking for answers to this question by entering the brave new world of Biometric security.

Right down to the local level, both bureaucrats and law enforcement administrators have simply fallen in love with Biometrics, because it sounds great on paper and is a dream for civil servants obsessed with “risk assessment”. And it’s a multi-billion dollar industry in its own right. Once confined to fingerprints, blood stains and photo identification, Biometrics has now expanded to iris scanning software, RFID chips, DNA screening, X-ray body scanning and facial recognition scan software, some of which is readily available to buy online. In a bid to move further towards a cashless society, the biometric thumb scans has even made its way into today’s vending machines (more fun for the kids).

Say Hello To My Little Friend

Meet your new little buddy, the RFID chip. He’s everywhere- in your subway pass, your passport, your luggage, even burried in the neck of your house pet. RFID-ID tracking chips and human implants are no longer theoretical, they are fast becoming commonplace. Driving this whole revolution is, of course, the rise in popularity and universal adoption of the microchip. It’s applications are virtually limitless.

As UK based lecturer and best-selling author David Icke explained recently on tour, “It’s not just about electronic tagging…  microchips are ready to be introduced.” Icke added, “The technology is designed to have the emotional, mental and physical level of people manipulated and dictated to from the computer to the chip.  They can isolate an individual or they can do it en mass. They (the administrators) can make you docile, aggressive (etc)”.

  
Philosopher and Filmmaker Godrey Reggio explains the relationship between technology, art and language in today’s modern world.

The role of art in understanding the technocracy

Art can play a significant role in either unmasking a technocracy or conditioning people to passively accept and be literally amazed by it. In the case of the film The Matrix, it has most likely awakened more young minds to the architecture of control-based systems designed by the governing corporate elite.

A look at the popular Terminator film series, particularly its latest episode Terminator Salvation, shows what can happen at the end of our current trajectory of unmanned, computer controlled drone attack aircraft and automated robotic military weaponry. An awakened mind may look at this film and see the perverse nature in these kinds of military applications, while a military bureaucrat or military contractor engineer may see something completely different- a beautiful new world of automated machinery which takes the human element completely out of one side of the equation. You can almost hear them now, “Wow. That would be sooo cool.” Whereas the US military used to mean ‘soldier vs. soldier’, and lately ‘soldier vs. man’, it is increasing becoming a disturbing story of ‘machines vs. man’.

Other important pieces of cinema in recent years include the film, The Minority Report, based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, which shows a future law enforcement based on the rather disturbing concept of ‘Precrime’- a trend based on computer generated ‘profiling’ which is already coming into play with law enforcement today, and the twin TV series productions, Battlestar Galactica and Caprica, both of which trace the genesis and social adoption of robotics in their off-planet fictional human civilization. Also worth mentioning are the films A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) and the 70′s cult classic Zero Population Growth staring Oliver Reed, a distopic tale which chronicles a future where child birth is banned by the State.

Pop Tech: A controversial scene from the Björk music video “All is full of love”.

The future is at our doorstep

 So many of the scenarios mapped out in popular science fiction are coming to fruition much faster than expected. Scenes that we thought were never going to happen for the next 100 years are appearing in our news every day, just visit WIRED magazine’s website for daily evidence of this.

Scientists, ‘futurist’ pundits, policy makers and the most crucial group in this mix- the public, have probably enjoyed many films and viewed scenes like the Voight-Kampf Test in Blade Runner (a film also based on a Philip K. Dick novel), the invention of CYLONS in Caprica or the smart iris scans in The Minority Report, considering any serious moral or ethical questions to be generations away- not a priority for discussion today, and yet suddenly we have the future right at our doorstep.

A contemporary philosopher might ask: Are the advancements in intelligent computers, virtual realities, robotics and pharmaceutical drugs serving to further detach humanity from its core sense of human experience? What makes a human unique? Is it breeding, or individuality? Is it imagination, or is it the soul? One thing is for sure, in order to address some of these deeper points we will need more philosophers than ever before.

One the stated goals of the Technocracy is to engineer and perfect a mechanized society, where each person is groomed to perform a specific role in the socio-economic scheme of things. Transhumanism, formerly known as the once popular Eugenics Movement, takes this a step further by looking to technology to enhance and augment the current human form. From a technocrat’s perspective, humans themselves are seen as biological androids who can be medicated, trained and steered through the application of pharmaceutical products coupled with psychological conditioning. When introduced into the human body, powerfully genetically engineered pharmaceutical products can yield results similar to that of programming a computer to generate a desired outcome. The Technocrat would consider the recent spike in use of antidepressants and serotonin re-uptake inhibitors like Prozac, Paxil, and ‘mood stabilisers’ like Zanex and Lithium as some kind of positive and necessary trend, while the Transhumanists will offer that this trend has inched humanity into position for what they believe is our destiny in their next phase of evolution- bringing us even closer to our machine companions.

Learning to Love Your Robot

 For years, the holy grail of technology has definitely been the robot. Once the stuff of Victorian science fiction, machines made in man’s likeness embody the ultimate in man’s pursuit of technology. 

Advances in robotics, particularly work done in countries like Japan, have already eclipsed the fictional horizon and are with us as we speak. We can look to the Far East for more evidence here.  The HRP-4C, a walking, talking humanoid fashion model ‘fembot’ developed by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) made her first official runway debut in a special fashion show in Tokyo last year. Not least of all, the HRP-4C fembot seems to have mastered that all important vacant, expression-less stare we see on most top runway models. She may have a future after all…

  
Humanoid fashion model ‘fembot’ developed by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology.

 A scene like that of Kissing robots may be a disturbing and perverse watershed moment for many people, but it constitutes a breakthrough moment for certain technology enthusiasts and science fiction fans (or sci-fi freaks, depending on your particular bent). As odd as it might seem, an idea that was once reserved for MTV and comic books has, at a great expense, now manifested itself in real life (see video below).

  
Kissing robots developed by the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology The Digital Economy

 There are plenty of innovations we can point to that may give an indication as to where technology is going.

So called ‘intelligent’ computers and their many applications have already replaced a significant proportion of the world’s workforce and slowly but surely man is losing his grip on the fundamental idea of “the fruits of one’s labor”. This means that the single biggest  growth area for jobs is not for men and women- it’s jobs for computers because they are cheaper, faster and in some cases ‘smarter’ than their human counterparts.

One of the biggest growth areas in terms of human jobs has been in software and digital media, a culture that for the most part was(and still is to some degree) built on dreams of a 20 hour work week and million dollar employee stock options, and it’s an industry where the trusted microchip is now doing all the work. A corporation like Microsoft built its global empire on a product which cost nothing to reproduce, yet is sold for hundreds of dollar per unit. The social ramifications of the digital products these same companies are rolling out are even more compelling- replacing the human experience with a software interface and virtual communities and portals- boasting numbers in the hundreds of millions. 

The video gaming and vice industries also comprise a large portion of this digital economy. One of the biggest sectors of the digital world is the infamous global digital sex industry, which now dwarfs its own print and vice predecessors. Again, this reaffirms the move from the human experience to the virtual, or machine generated experience.

Waking up to the matrix

 Technology might be the tool of choice for the social engineer and a power obsessed technocratic elite, but it is a long way from being infallible or, in some cases- even practical. Huge amounts of money are wasted by the State annually on technology which has no practical application on the ground. After they have wasted millions on purchasing it, the State will often waste millions more in an attempt to force it down the throat of a generation. This was certainly the case with regards to the now obsolete Anthropogentic, or ‘Man-made’ Global Warming movement. In ten years it grew into one of the world’s most expensive state-sponsored global industries, an industry based entirely on computer modeled projections of what might happen in 50 years time- an example of some people’s unquestioning faith in a piece of computer software (and not the science of real world observation) that purported to predict the future- and thus, the fate of the entire human race.

Understanding the nature of certain technological failures can also help us to better realise that not all seemingly new and exciting innovations are effective in achieving the stated objectives of their designers, and are hardly safe from theft or gross manipulation.

Bottom line: Software is written by humans, so it can be rigged, cracked, and made redundant – and robots can (and will) malfunction or run out of battery power, DNA can be switched, forged or data details attached to it altered, and computers… can certainly be hacked.

RFID chips can also be hacked and disabled using basic, inexpensive electronic equipment available from your local electronic shop. In addition to this, it’s important to point out that legions of ‘white hat’ hackers (many of whom could easily be confused with authentic libertarians) have done incredible work in recent years to expose the futility of State-sponsored big brother technologies, helping in some way to keep the governing and corporate elite in check.

  
One of the most powerful demonstrations of a white hat hacker, easily hacking RFID-chipped passports in his neighbourhood.

 In a world that some might say constitutes many more consumers than it does deep thinkers, technology is steaming ahead in an unrestrained fashion. If mankind was ever presented with an opportunity to start asking the hard questions and identifying the real dilemmas, it is right here and right now.

To delay any serious discussion about the nature of new technology and its place alongside the human race is to deny any of the inherent responsibilities that we are entrusted with as a race on this planet. There is a very real quickening taking place before our eyes, and there is a risk that certain technological applications could supplant a valuable set of commonly understood, fundamental languages and human values.  

We have to ask ourselves which aspects of the real human experience are we willing to sacrifice for a few abstract constructs like ‘convenience’ and ‘security’. Rutger Hauer’s character in the film, Blade Runner, offers a replicant’s perspective on this, one of the great philosophical questions of our time…

    
Rutger Hauer’s famous passage,  “Tears in the Rain”.

 As we witness the rise of a 21st century scientific matrix, we must all ask ourselves that basic question: how far- and to what end should mankind go in order to achieve his life, liberty and happiness?

Here, Godfrey Reggio offers up a fitting conclusion, “Mystery is gone to the certainty of technological principles. So the real terror, the real aggression against life comes in the form of the pursuit of our technological happiness”.

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About the author: Patrick Henningsen is a writer, filmmaker, communications consultant and managing editor of 21st Century Wire.  Contact: pj.henningsen@gmail.com facebooktwittergoogle_plusredditpinterest
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