This is another little mini-essay that I’ve culled from my posts at Nanodot.
Now that the future is here, if not quite manifestly obvious, should we even waste our time with human desires anymore?
That is a question technically savvy people need ask themselves. (Yes, I know that’s grammatically incorrect but are you so sure gender, let alone gender in language, is really meaningful anymore?) The argument could be made that they don’t really serve any purpose anymore and are a tremendous waste of time. This is a slight variation on the Spock meme–a hopefully more constructive variation. Perhaps I can call it the Gandhi meme.
Some folks, sometimes I’m one of them, perhaps mortified with what human motivations sometimes drive us to do, want to walk away from the shallow impulses that make us fear different skin colors or engage in anorexic behavior or seek to have children in our fifties and sixties. Aside from some health reasons, why waste time with this?
Why envy the power and beauty of youth? Why have children in the first world if they consume more than 20 times the resources of children in the third world? Why envy all those kids that were smarter and faster than you were in high school? Some human desires are driving this rush of technology. Is this good or bad?
Perhaps the first thing we need to focus on is transcending the shallowness. We have to sit down and think about what’s best for us as a civilization and culture *not* what’s best for us as a species because the time is rapidly approaching where we will differentiate into a wide variety of species. What’s best for us as individuals and what’s best for us as groups and a group? How do we keep the two from conflicting?