The Connection between Human and Technologies - Assignment Example

The connection between human and technologies The disputable issue of being human in a futuristic worldin the book Neuromancer by William Gibson. This paper is aimed to uncover the arguable issue of being a human in a futuristic world of technologies, how the definition of a human changes with the introduction of cyber technologies in the people’s everyday lives and we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of living or it is better to say surviving this world. The book Neuromancer was written when the high-tech was a new thing that attracted people and was a brand-new idea for the writers. This book deals with such already known concepts such as: virtual reality, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, cyberspace (computer network matrix) and multinational corporations. The book tells us a story of a young cyber-criminal living in a computerized world. The human’s life and technologies are connected nowadays, the author of the article devoted to the issues of biology in connection with modern technologies says that: “The era of molecular biology was marked near its beginning by the triumphalism attending the discovery of the double helix and by the seemingly unstoppable ascendance of the mechanistic view of organisms” (Technology and Human Responsibility). The main character of the book (his name is Case) is a “console cowboy” who has been living and working in cyber space (matrix) until he lost his job. Since then he takes drugs and miserably wastes the time. In his world people are not treated as body + mind, their personality exists only within the matrix. Case says about himself and the girl he liked: “All the meat and all it wants” (Gibson, 1986). This phrase may sound just a rude interpretation of human’s lust, but while trying to deepen into this world we are able to see that the perception of a human as a “meat” is real. Their reality is based on different principles fron our one, so we cannot really put them on the one line and compare them as they are; I think we should look closer on what is a person in the cyber-world. So having done this we see that the body doesn’t play an important role anymore, only the power of the neuro-system and the human’s brain carries a true value. Nevertheless, if we make an attempt to compare the modern understanding of a human and the one from the imagined future of the Neuromancer we will obviously find a lot of differences. Nowadays the human being is a complicated system of different biological and psychological processes which work in accord with the body; while in the high-tech world the body-element is thrown away from this system i.e. if you can replace any of your organs do they still should be treated as something important? So, can we really define what the human is? I consider that we actually can do this but only concerning the present time, not future. William Gibson himself told that the writers of the fantastic stories are not fortune tellers, they just create something yet unknown and present it to the contemporaries (Dayal, 2012). But if we try to define human of the Neuromancer’s world we will obviously get lost trying to find a real human there. All the people of this futuristic world changed themselves one way or another; they apply to the genetic engineering and cyber technologies to improve their bodies; most of the inhabitants of the new world take drugs and waste their lives without any particular aim or devote it to money-getting rash. The protagonist himself is the best example of the human of the future, which is, still, cannot be somehow connected with the modern understanding of human. Preceding to the issue of how the technologies influence our self-recognition and lives, we should mention that even the least intervention into the human’s mind may result in quite an interesting and strange way. Speaking about Case we have to say that his whole life-style was a complete intervention into the neuro-system. The self-concept is a very individual and fragile thing. It takes a lot of time to form and so little time to ruin it. In the book Neuromancer this concept is represented on the background of the technologized world. Matrix influenced the protagonist’s considerations about real and unreal; then he lost his job which had a great influence understanding of his self-concept – he misses the feeling of the alternative reality in which he used to be. So we can say that his self-concept is real only in matrix while Case feels lost in a real world. Nowadays we can discuss something of the kind when speaking about the teenagers spending their childhood in the unreal worlds of computer games imagining themselves being different heroes and monsters and feeling lonely in the reality. And the last factor which is still controlled by the nature is our body. I have nothing to add, because I already mentioned that the body-factor is put aside with the introduction of the high-tech into everyday life, the human body is considered to be just a simple packaging for the brains just exactly as it happened in Neuromancer. Stephen Talbott in his interview to the representative of the Nature Institute Dolores Brien says about technologies and cyberspace in connection with that in the modern world: "We have adopted a passive view of the technology in which we are embedded and upon which we are increasingly dependent. We surrender ourselves to it, however, at a terrible cost, not the least of which is a loss of a whole and centered self and the freedom to make choices appropriate to what it means to be a human being" (Brien). Taking into account the fact that one of the worlds under the study doesn’t exist in reality, here we can conclude, that the human is a product of the world he lives in. The modern understanding of being human differs from the one from the Neuromancer book but still we can trace some similarities at least because the changed variant of a human still has a word “human” in the definition. So we can say that technology does influence the people’s lives no matter they want it or not. We should not be afraid of the technologization of the world because it is inevitable follower of the world’s technology development. But, to my mind, we also should not fall victims to this process, loose ourselves and melt in the cyberspace like the main character of the book under the study. Technology’s role in the understanding of the human. The modern world can provide us with a lot of new discoveries in the field of technology, but we should be careful with them for not to get trapped between being a human and non-human creature filled with nano-technologies and biologically improved organs. It is a very popular and disputable issue nowadays and the number of opinions concerning the role of technologies in the human development equals the number of people on the Earth. My thesis in this work is “Never abuse the technological invasion”. Craig Holdrege in his book Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context speaks against treating the human organism as some kind of machine; he describes the biological revolution of the 20th century as a many-faceted phenomenon which influenced the modern state of the society. So the invasion into the human’s organism could be useful, but again we should not abuse its advantages. The understanding of what the human is has changed through the time. The influence of high-tech is clearly seen on the example of disable people. If earlier the disability was a kind of a death sentence for many people nowadays these people are provided with the ability to live a normal life. In the Middle Ages even the slight disability was considered to be a God’s punishment nowadays it is not even a big problem. The researcher Stephen Talbot says that: “Disabilities often challenge our sense of who we are — challenge us to become more than who we thought we were. But the invitation of the various technological assists may well be to become less than we were. It is an invitation to define ourselves by our lack — a lack we must try to cover over through technical ingenuity” (Talbott). So the lives of the disable people are changed and they treat themselves the other way too. So technologies can improve the human’s body and influence the mind and change our self-concepts. In the modern world the human amalgamates with technologies and they become the initial parts of each other. We see our friends through the computer and phone screens and relate our feelings not with a real person but with the icon pictures of their accounts. We create the non-existing worlds in the computer games for to escape the reality and associate ourselves with the artificially created images of heroes. If we continue behaving this way and submerging into the cyber space in a generation or two we will live within the internet and will not be able to differentiate where is our real I and where is the artificial cyber-I. In conclusion I want to say that the technologies, cybernetics, biotechnologies and many others, have a great influence our lives and change the ways we understand the world and ourselves. Many researchers devoted their works to the issue of being a human in a non-human technological world and they provided both advantages and disadvantages of this state and how it influences the people’s understanding of themselves within this modern high-tech world. Our computers, mobile phones and other devices absorb our I-concepts and create one huge mind of the internet users which works as a solid system which has no “turn-off” button. The human being is not separate from the world of technologies anymore and the book Neuromancer shows one of the possible ways of how the world may look like in several years. Works cited Brien, Dolores. Computers, the Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness (an Interview with Stephen Talbott). Retrieved the 1st December from: http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/jung.htm Dayal, Geeta (2012). William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong. Retrieved the 1st December from: http://www.wired.com/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/2/ Gibson, William (1986). Neuromancer. Ace (1st edition). Holdrege, Craig (1996). Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press. Talbott, Stephen L. Extraordinary Lives: Disability and Destiny in a Technological Age. Nature Institute Perspectives. The Nature Institute. Technology and Human Responsibility. Retrieved 1st December from: http://natureinstitute.org/tech/ Read More