Maybe it’s being surrounded by fairly, hmm, let’s say “quirky” people, but it seems like I’ve been confronted with a Robotic vs Organic concept since my youth. In my earlier years, it was the infamous Ninja vs Robot Debate, which was a continuous argument about who would win in a fight. I was on the Ninja side.
Even now I belong to a forum that calls its members “bots.” Bots who type with robot fingers.
My experience is not an anomaly. Indeed, I can bring up a ton of examples of the Mechanical Anxiety that shows up in the media.
Um, Colbert anyone?
Even The Onion weighs in:
In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?
And the one that perked my interest:
CNN’s Scientists: Humans and Machines will merge in Future
As a writer, it peaks my interest. How is it that we’re all nervous about the same thing? Well, I guess this might be a purely American anxiety. I haven’t run into articles from foreign presses with the same kind of stance, but I also don’t look at foreign presses. It’s the language barrier. Predictable maybe, but true.
Anyway, I call it an anxiety, because none of these articles/videos really go out of their way to embrace the mechanical, the robotic. I mean, it makes sense to be nervous about something that effects everyone, yes. Like the economy right now–it impacts everyone. But something like this–where it seems so trite and trivial and downright silly. Have we all watched one too many matinee movies on the SciFi channel? Or is there something about our humanness that we’re trying to grasp onto, to cling to, to keep ourselves from forgetting. Through our own industrialization and our so-called technological advancements, we are still fragile. We are simply skin and bone and tissue.
Ah, but let me ask you this: does skin and bone and tissue really make you human?