Saturday, December 24, 2016

Evolution Within the Revolution

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

Watching my computer screen dance as a McAfee technician in India works on my computer.  Day nine (?) of the computer saga. 
What is this strange new way of being?!  We insert just enough familiar words in our digital lexicon to give an impression that this is of our own creation and control.
So now we watch bits of information flicker across our screen, for the moment still deigning to communicate in cryptic collections of runes that allow some rudimentary illusion of our control…..for now.
It is so easy to just sit and watch them flicker, while across our thoughts flickers a nascent awareness that they are watching us.
We are learning to live in a world where outcomes and results and responses are no longer physically rational and predictable, or at least fixable by wrench and brush and visual analysis and mechanical reasoning.
An invisible dropped bit can cost a lifetime’s work, a technician’s job, or a company’s future.
Here we see a hint of the difference between the preceding physical evolutionary world and the present ethereal information world.
The mutations and accidents, cataclysms and catastrophes, death and disaster that have always beset living systems have promoted evolution, migrations, and adaptations, resulting in flexibility and forgiveness and survival imperative built into the biological systems.
No such accommodating tolerance is exhibited by the roots and gates and registers of digital information.  The random upset of one DRAM cell has no chance to propagate into a genetic adaptation and evolutionary leap into new capabilities.
We, the carbon and water components of this information marriage, must do the adapting and evolving.  We would do well to pay attention to our rampant adaptations, and to ask exactly what we are becoming and what we want to become.
The evolution is happening and will happen.  We will either be blindly carried along, humanity moving away from what it is to be human because we do not even know what that is, or we will consciously choose our direction, using the present Big Bang of the information universe to do our bidding instead of letting it dictate the shallowness of our relationships and consume our lives by dictating our consumption of goods and entertainment. 
In conscious awareness of our now freely chosen direction, we can reclaim our human destiny.

Pass it on
Copyright 2016 Don Ray


No comments:

Post a Comment