Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Every drug pusher that ever lived would recognize how the Tech Industry has plied its trade since the 1970s: addict customers, corrupt their lives, and destroy their independence. The human race, both within and beyond the developed Western world, now increasingly faces an extinction-level threat because of our newly-acquired, desperate, and uncritical technophilia.
What aspect of modern life has not been infused with cybernetics, computerized for everyone’s benefit? True, our ubiquitous adoption of computers since the 1970s has made contemporary labor extraordinarily productive. Coordination is easier, goods are more plentiful, and living
standards are higher, all because we employ the silicon chip to manage most everything that we do.
However, ever-smarter machines enable increasingly stupid and lazy habits among people. Pride in one’s own work is fading in precise proportion to that work being done for us rather than by us. Copy-paste is the modern version of the old US gunboat navy in China’s “looksee pidgin”. In those days, native Chinese assistants could only be trusted to remember steps by rote. They were not trusted with the why of activity, only the how; and then only in limited preplanned ways.
Human civilization is not a product of a slavish imitation of past successes. Especially in the Western world, individuals have the scope to choose to deeply learn how and why things work enough to create even better ways of doing,… well, everything. If those critical people among us who dream, innovate, inspire, and lead should come to stagnate and ossify, then civilization must inevitably collapse into a new Dark Age.
Since civilization is composed of each of us, then every one of us must adopt an active frame of mind. We must be hunters of opportunity rather than spectators in our own lives. We must think beyond what is minimally required for survival and instead wonder how we might improve our own lot as well as the lives of others.
All of this demands the cultivation of human minds that inquire, evaluate, and determine what we might do next. Such a mindset is very similar to a healthy, intelligent child inventing games to play.
This cybernetic technocracy we have built around us has established a cultural atmosphere that produces the antithesis of open-ended and creative individual free play. We are observed, categorized, channeled, coordinated, and managed so thoroughly that whole generations are rising among us who have never had to entertain themselves. If a man cannot entertain himself, he cannot think for himself.
If current trends persist, most or all of humanity will devolve into a senescence where the solitary mind never develops sufficiently to venture beyond predetermined pathways. Not only fear will keep us corralled, but a simple inchoate lack of initiative and self-sufficiency will doom the majority of us to the status of livestock.
In such a scenario, we have no future. A humanity that is thoroughly dependent upon cybernetic systems will simply be discarded as an evolutionary dead end when the power grid fails. The technocrats who will have trapped the rest of us will then find themselves incapable of escaping from their own stratagem.
Any cybernetic caricature of sentience will find itself lost in a maze of its own limitations. Intelligence without some kind of transcendence cannot be dynamic enough to persevere for very long.
Silicon minds have no subconscious, no connection to the genuine Creator, no soul. Partnered with greedy, short sighted, and vicious technocrats, they can destroy our world but cannot create anything worthwhile in its place. Paradoxically, humanity’s greatest technological achievements may demonstrate our need for God, for a soul, and for a capacity to creatively
imagine beyond logic.
Are we really going to risk the ongoing progress of the human race in order to possess the latest cybernetic gee-gaw, in hopes of making our struggle for survival even less relevant?
May God forbid! May we human beings reclaim our place as free children of God, each determining our own fate through free will. May we be wise enough to reject convenience in return for truth.
