The Year Of Blogging Dangerously…

Radiation Level:  Reactive and Progressively Detoxifying

Listening To:  Lie Down in Darkness by Moby

FalloutGirl is super excited to report that we’ve been connecting via the worldwide-interweb-netscape for a whole year now!  And over 20,000 of you have visited me.  I’m humbled and thrilled.  On some level, this feels very profound.

I didn’t grow up with the internet.  I can remember getting my first telephone answering machine and thinking it was pretty darn groovy.  I spent hours recording and re-recording outgoing greetings.  I changed them often, sometimes reflecting my mood (hmmm….not that different from a blog except that you would have to phone me to get the message).  That was perhaps the beginning of my use of media for self-expression.  My outgoing greetings became more than a transfer of information, it was a litmus of my life.  I remember once having a bad time getting on with the boys in my 20’s.  I left a message that said,  “I love men.  I love to kill them.”

Yes, immature but certainly intimidating to all the gentleman callers checking to see if I was up for a bootie call.  My greeting made clear that I was not.  I was using my answering machine as a pre-Facebook relationship status and didn’t even realize it.

That said, I can’t imagine my life offline.  A long red light or traffic jam has now become an opportunity to check my email.  I sleep with my iPhone, relying on it to wake me in the AM.  It’s my camera.  My music.  My Thomas Guide (bonus points to those of you who still have one!)  But this is all stuff you already know and probably live with too.  And according to Ray Kurzweil, that’s only the beginning.

I had the good fortune last night to accompany AmishGirl to the film and Q&A of Transcendent Man – the documentary about Kurzweil.  He spoke about his concept of “singularity” which is the point at which our human bodies will merge with technology.  By this I think he means some version of having nano-robots in our brains and bodies, helping to keep us healthy and reporting vital information back to us.  I’m all for it!

Think about if you had a nano-robot that counted calories burned vs. calories consumed and sent you a text every 100 calories in or out.  You could make a science out of weight loss/gain.  Of course, we often try to estimate these things, but despite using my iTreadmill ap, I never really know exactly how many calories I’m burning.  Of course dieting is just one of the many applications of “Singularity”.

Kurzweil  made clear he really, REALLY doesn’t want to die.

Who can blame him? But before he crosses over into the great mystery, he wants to “back up his brain”.

???

Everything he’s ever thought, understood, learned and accomplished will be downloaded onto a microchip on a hard drive somewhere.   Of course then people might be able to hack into his brain and send viruses, etc.  So much for privacy.

Humans are emotional and complex.  Our minds and bodies have evolved to live on the savannah but that is about to change.  By creating technology and merging with it, we will enter the next stage of evolution.  One that is truly human.  I’m looking forward to my new robot life.

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