Our Moment in Time

Brian Christian discusses the threat of humans acting more like machines and machines acting more like humans in The Most Human Human. Our world is extremely interconnected by data and the smartphone's access to the internet. This presents many advantages and disadvantages to our modern world that effects us all because while technology connects us, it also alienates us. I believe the greater threat is humans becoming more likes machines because I fear that we are headed to a point where we will be fully uploaded into a virtual reality and without human experience. Some might think that I fear the unknown, but I think this is pretty much the next step in human evolution. WE  already play online games with specialized characters designed to our preferences where our characters can fully interact. The reason I fear this is because we will lose human interaction and experience. 

The movie Transcendence depicts our future because Will Caster is fully uploaded to the internet and capable of running the world. Even though this is way too far into the future, I believe a more accomplishable state of virtual reality is like online games. Online games permits humans to have a whole new life, if they please. For instance, the online game The Sims, is a virtual reality world that resembles our world. However, I believe Christian is saying that artificial intelligence and technology in general should be used to supplement our existence not be our existence. When we upload ourselves to a new world created by us, we neglect to understand the history that has brought us to this moment. Everything that happened before us helped shape this moment and frankly we are a product of our past and that is something that makes us human. We are ultimately influenced by spontaneous people's actions and natural phenomena. Therefore, there is greater harm in humans becoming more like machines because we will eventually avoid our moment in time by playing in a virtual reality game instead of interacting with the world.

Some might think this is a false assumption because technology might change our human interaction, instead of destroying it. But I will say this is a wrong observation because though technology has its advantages it also has its disadvantages. Growing up in the technological era allows me to share with you that technology separates us. Why do you think all of the social medias try to make it easier for one to "share," "like," or express emotions with the use of avatars or emojis? The problem with social media is the struggle to maintain human experience in a virtual world and the more we become machine-like the more we isolate ourselves from each other. 

Technology will eventually surpass our intelligence because of its memory storage and will but it will never contain human experience, something so original to existence, because it lacks what makes us human. The threat is not with machines becoming more like humans, it is with humans becoming more like machines. Therefore, it is reasonable to hold back technology's advancement for the sake of human experience.

"Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time." - Martin Heidegger