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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Look out for the crash.

Technology is moving too fast for me to keep up with. Suddenly everyone has to be in touch with each other. Everybody wants instant gratification. If I were to maintain the same amount of information intake today as I did when I got my first Commodore C64, my brain would fry.

I've never been much of a social person. And yet I have accounts with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and I can't remember all the other services. I have photo site accounts with Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, and Windows Live. Of course I screwed up my Flickr account. And use Photobucket for housing a few avatar images that don't host on some chat sites. In self defense I hardly ever use MySpace and Twitter. Or my cell phone for that matter. And yet I need my daily Internet fix, or I suffer withdrawls. I think maybe my blog here has been read by a handful of people. About the same follow me on Facebook. Even less than that comment on my posts around the web.

What would we do if we scaled back on all this interconnectedness? I seriously think an entire generation would be totally lost. Maybe Ray Kurtzweil is right. Humanity is on a collision course of merging with it's machines. With it's tech. I don't claim to want to become a Luddite. I've been enthusiastic about all the cool stuff happening. But I'm not sure if I'm ready to go the way of the cyborg. I've still got all my appendages. The closest thing to augmentation for me is prescription eyeglasses. And I was wearing those since I was seven.

I don't want to live forever. So look at it this way. About the time America taps the last of it's social security funds for us baby boomers, the gen X'ers will have all merged into it's electronic shells. Machines don't eat, so they don't need jobs. So they won't need to worry about social security since they live as long as the hardware works.

I hope the electric smart grid is in place by then. You 'borgs are gonna need a recharge!




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