Trending: The debate over the merging of man with machine

May 9th, 2014
Trending: The debate over the merging of man with machine

By Naomi Dolin-Aubertin

I read a blog post recently by an individual struggling with what he perceives as the inevitable merging of humans and machines.This type of soul-searching in the growing glow of technology is a trend running through entertainment and technology blogs.

Increasingly, we live in the blue glow of our various screens and an online community of writers, filmmakers, and artists is dissecting what it means to be human and what it means to be part of a community when we are so intrinsically linked to our screens that we can miss what is happening around us. I appreciate the irony in this, as indeed, many others do, writing, sharing and uploading onto the very same platform that is being evaluated.

Kim McCormick wrote about banishing her phone from her bedroom for a month to combat the pernicious cycle of checking social media immediately before going to sleep and upon waking. Her takeaway from the experiment:

I'm hitting snooze less often; the alarm has only one, pretty annoying sound. But really, it's the peacefulness of letting my mind ease into wakefulness, rather than checking to see who's shared an interesting photo of flowers or dogs, that makes me happiest about reshaping my habits.

Kathleen Davis of FastCompany posted only this morning on her life without a smart phone. She describes how without the constant distraction or convenience of a ready-handy phone, her mind has more time to wander and she has trained herself to find directions, ask for help, or simply not know the answer to something immediately.

There's a particularly telling video making its rounds on YouTube. Posted on the 25th of last month, merely two weeks ago, it has already received over 32 million views! Look Up is a spoken word film entreating the viewer to look up from their screens and live life the way it is meant to be, lest we miss out on the things that make life worth living. It is the same message, albeit more highbrow, as the Toyota car commercial getting a zombiesque family off their living room couch to visit Old Faithful in the real world.

What all this amounts to is a growing unease with our dependency on technology in our lives. Our screens, our wearables, our social media updates do combine to form a picture of either a new way of life, or an addiction, depending on who you talk to.

SigmoThat being said, there is much good to be found in this influx of technology. A professor at the University of Houston has developed and is testing an iPhone app designed to detect melanoma. So far, the app and $500 attachment have an 85% accuracy rate, ranking it better than most primary care physicians and a perfect diagnostic tool for rural or underdeveloped areas. [1]  There's a universal translator called Sigmo that allows you to speak into it and will translate out into a chosen language through cloud-powered services, connecting people across language barriers. In another medical leap, a research team has created "the world’s first flexible, organic transistor that will help make patient monitoring devices easier to implant and integrate with the human body, and is expected to be adopted into wearable, patch-like health monitors or implantable devices like pace makers." It's also sterilizable. 

Do I think we are headed to an embedded technology existence a la the novel, Feed? I hope not. That being said, I also don't believe that a person is intrinsically any less human for having a Luke Skywalker-esque robotic arm or a visor that establishes a measure of vision like Geordi in Star Trek. After all, our technology is a tool and like any tool, the measure of its effect is in direct correlation to the intention of its user. We may be in an exploratory period in which we allow ourselves to be overcome by the allure of our shiny gadgets, but I have to hope that as we become ever more accustomed to their usage, our screens will serve as tools to make us stronger, healthier, and kinder human beings. 


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