As technology advances, people with certain skills formerly in prominence find themselves unemployed, made unfortunate and obsolete by the march of machines. But, few ever consider the unfortunate problem of those whose talents have yet to find a niche at all. What would Mozart have done before the invention of the piano? What would Van Gogh have painted before the invention of vibrantly colored paints? What sort of empire would Napoleon have had without gunpowder? The world is awash in an epidemic of underemployment, talented people without a socially acceptable outlet. All over the world humans are engaged in strange practices that could one day manifest as the single edge required to reach a new historical plateau. For better or worse, humanity is chomping at the bit of its true potential for tyranny and liberty. Old Man Burroughs warned us in an essay entitled, “The Coming of The Purple Better One” that “The aggressive southern ape will block your way to space.” A symbol for the conservative warmongers, the aggressive southern ape aims to use all technology as a club and block any progressive potential.
The technology currently being researched by the government of the aggressive southern ape will ensure a more complete tyranny for the future, and reduce the time required to conquer small countries to mere hours. Soldiers riding in armored, robotic exoskeletons will run at vehicle speed and be impervious to small arms fire. Linked to a centralized command that will be able to correlate their sensory inputs to adjust combat strategy in real-time, no fleshy insurgency will stand a gooey oozing bloody chance. Semi-autonomous, all-terrain robots will provide logistical support without need for roads or direct supervision. Semi-autonomous flight drones will run constant surveillance, and provide cover fire for their semi-autonomous machinegun carrying brothers. No longer suffering the weakness of human frailty, these robots will bind together the future military into a metallic force to be feared. What underemployed talent pool, you ask, lies at the heart of these robotic storm troopers of our vast future empire? The caffeine-twitchy, obese children, mashing buttons on their video game controllers are the genocide reaping soldiers of the future. Their button clicking pudgy fingers are wearing jackboots; I can hear them coming now.
No tyranny is to be without its own underground resistance force. Indeed, the future resistance will require a human capable of pursuing supply vehicles across impossible terrain. A human willing and capable to personally plant improvised explosives on the back of an armored exoskeleton, and then dodge away from the hail storm of fifty caliber rounds spewed forth from the cyborgs ammo-hopper when it explodes. The resistance will need humans able to perform feats of daring acrobatics in urban environments to avoid surveillance drones. Who, you ask, what force of underemployed supermen can perform such feats? The impressive, fit practitioners of free running will not stand for the limits placed on them by the southern ape agenda. These future soldiers of the underground will fight off the robot hordes that are the military pipe dream of the aggressive southern ape, and help to clear our way to space.
Every time a man tosses himself from the top of a building with a parachute just to enjoy the fall, the world should think, there goes another desperate spaceman looking for employment. Any business person with an office above the fiftieth floor should not be calling the police to have these thrill seekers imprisoned by the ape administration. No! Instead they should be helping to clear a way to space. The future space laborer lives in the heart and strong stomach of the BASE jumper. In the soul of the human willing to take risks for the joy of freefall lays the space faring potential of our species. We here on space station earth need to foster their semi-suicidal risk taking for the benefit of us all. But, no, says the aggressive southern ape, the unrestrained class of climber-jumpers must be understood for the real threat they pose. People seeking to upset the ape agenda with boundary pushing practices must be stopped. In the post-911 world, these insurgent threats must be shipped off, preferably to some far away Prison Island to preserve civilian calm and bring balance and mediocrity to the population.
Infodump:
Sarcos: Robot Exoskeleton Manufacturers
Robotic Exoskeleton Story By Ed Yeates of KSL
FutureWeapons Coverage of The Crusher Robot Vehicle
Wikipedia: Free Running
Wikipedia: Parkour
BASE jumping
BASE jumpers who have died for the feeling of free fall
7.01.2008
Underemployed: Chomping at the bit
6.28.2008
Paraplegics and Autistics: New Nodes in the Comm-Network
Computer, a catch all word that hardly comes close to explaining the outer reaches of its implied potential. Its antiquated syllables slide off the speakers tongue with such speed that you can almost leave them out, assume them as being universally implied. Someday the word will become the verbal cue of a person’s age and technical ignorance, like when my grandmother advised me to adjust the antenna after the digital cable had gone to pixilated static.
Like the television, the radio, and the car before it, the computer is slowly fading into that ever present realm of invisible technologies. Little by little we fail to notice, or simply accept as axiomatic the computers in everything, connecting everything. We’ve ceased to wonder at the novelty of sending a file from one device to another. Now, we only notice we’re doing it when those devices fail to network, or – how quaint an idea – when a device wasn’t intended to network, and we find ourselves taking for granted that it would and should.
Many skeptics, Luddite technophobes, have come to question our growing relationship with the network. Parading in these Theroux-like ideas that we should return to nature, or at least that the computer should never have been given such power in our world. But let’s be honest with ourselves: the computer is not the prime mover of this grand network we are all a part of, it’s merely so much accelerant tossed on the unstoppable communications conflagration.
Really, it’s been growing for as long as humans have engaged others as messengers. There is a sort of charm for my cyberpunk soul in the idea of a human based proto-telecom network. But there is simply no way that sort of network could ever enable communications with the otherwise incommunicado worlds of the paraplegic and autistic in the profound way that computer driven networks have allowed.
Researchers at Cyberkinetics have received an Investigational Device Exemption from the FDA to conduct a clinical trials on a device they are calling BrainGate. With this device they hope to break open the confines of the paraplegic’s inability to communicate and self-mobilize by interfacing the brain directly with a computer that will read the brains output signals. In short, by learning to think the proper signals to the BrainGate, the paraplegic is able to move the cursor on a computer with their mind to enable communications, or - at some point further along in the project – pilot an electric wheel chair, or maybe a robotic exoskeleton.
Less physically invasive use of the computer is starting to force us to notice the complex ethical issues around our narrowly defined concepts of personhood, especially when applied to people with Autism. The Autistic Liberation Front, an organization that is challenging the idea that autism as a disease, contends that Autism is a way of life, a mode of perception, and they are using virtual worlds like Second Life to communicate their concerns to the unaware masses that seek to cure them.
Those who may be skeptical of ALF’s position on Autism should review the websites and videos of Amanda Baggs, an Autistic activist, whose perceptive analysis of the institutional bias of the normal opened my mind to thinking about this issue differently. The struggle of ALF and that of the Transhumanists is definitely running a parallel circuit. Asking the important question: what do we mean by human?
We’ve already been co-opted into this system. We’ve already taken many bites from the apple here, and there are many possibilities to expand the horizons of human understanding staring us in the face. Today the new connections in the network forged by technological advancement seem radically invasive, they make us uncomfortable. But tomorrow, they’ll become common place, be considered passé, and become invisible to us.
Infodump:
Cyberkinetics Inc. Site
Cyberkinetics Inc. BrainGate Page
Paraplegic using similar technology to BrainGate on PBS Show
Paraplegic using BrainGate on ABC 6
HAL Exoskeleton
Autistic Liberation Front
BBC News 4 Story On ALF
Amanda Baggs FAQ
Amanda Baggs Popular Youtube Video "In My Language"
