On Singularity
Image: Future Studies: Wikipedia
If Singularity was a supposed benefit to humanity then why are we all losing our ability to see, hear and feel our way forward as human beings? I suspect that it is far more insidious than the Singularity nirvana we are being told is technology led and determined.
How about we work away from that idea and actually focus on humanity rather rather another brand and corporation mantra?
I’m thinking that this utopia of corporation led upgrades, super-size-me's is all a farce and that the dichotomy between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever…that those alienated from digital connection as oppressed further by virtue of a need to eliminate this not technology corporation controlled.
So from these observances I posit that technology is at fault in many of the ways in which we now attempt to relate (as different to connection).
It is apparent to me I’m also aware of digital technology skepticism as a treated like a chronic medical condition, so, as a Researcher I have to somehow straddle the fence and say everything is a mosaic of greys, not a billion pixel black nor white.
To acknowledge something new in our lives we must it seems resist, put the camera phone down, be conscious to breathing, to patterns in nature, to detox and feed our brains with stillness. Quite unlike what our would be Gods of the fake spiritual club would be telling us. Both previous sentences would suggest I have a position of this topic and others would claim an outright and abject bias.
I didn’t pick the fight, simply have a personal opinion which seems it places me on a specific side.
The position of technology at fault, that of eradicating humanity and replacing ourselves in the midst of that which we are not suggests we may have to give up trying to make a change and yet as I know all it takes is in listening in on our own feelings when we scroll through Facebook posts, Twitter messages and countless emails only to feel empty and sad thereafter.
A Singularity of mapped nodes in a network of quantified nothing seems as far from what humans need right now as we strip, rape and pillage the very environment of which sustains us and for how long? Computational zillions of zeros and ones all stacked up to extinguish the Anthropocene and thats a good thing?
I think there is a lot to be said here about the way traditional members of the Australian Aboriginal community disregard digital connections in preference for country led thinking and learning “on country” as it is described. Paddy Roe, Nyikina elder and Traditional Custodian posits that to survive we can’t live a life where we abandon dreaming our way forward that is country connected.
Not a hypothetical rather a manifestation of what exists in absolute reality.
Likewise Nyikina elder and Traditional Custodian Dr. Anne Poelina also suggests that these very technologies we pinned such great hopes on pulling communities out of poverty as nothing more that an edifice, an archetype and remnant of tools so insidious as to be irrelevant to culture, merely a distraction.
"...Technologies cause us to be automatic, not realistic, They cause us to stop knowing our liyan, our instinct. They stop us knowing ourselves."
Dr. Anne Poelina, Nyikina Elder, Fitzroy River, Kimberley Region, Australia - Balkinjirr Community - 18 April, 2016
Bringing into focus technology that is for humanity means acknowledging the social and ethical implications these BWC technologies have upon humanity, not simply a slogan that posits a determinism defined by the technology created by a few to rule and lord over many.
