ATTACK: The future brain
The sollipsism of technological evolution
IMAGINE:
The year is 2345. The singularity has come.
Humans are now capable of transporting their minds into computer networks as easily as making their morning coffee.
New lifestyles abound.
Going to the ‘office’ becomes a matter of joining your mind to the neural network of your respective ideology, contributing to the collective intelligence’s efforts to prosper and create in the pursuit of the unknown. Your body too connected to this collective intelligence, like a massive beehive, harmonious, beautiful, and lacking in the individuality we hold so dear.
Or perhaps, for the lazy ones, you lease access to your mind’s deep computing power in exchange for free transplantation into a virtual fantasy world. Living your life out in a beautiful waking dream, all the while helping those who would rather take the initiative in the real world.
For powerful free minds, the ability is present to ‘transcend’ into cyberspace. Your mind melding into the electronic and data impulses that make up the networks that rule all human existence.
Your power multiplies exponentially, able to control hundreds of thousands of units simultaneously. But not really.
A mind is a singular entity, like a current. You can multiply it, you can modulate the frequency, but it’s singularity remains.
After ‘transcending’ and uploading your mind to the network, outsourcing your memory needs, power needs, you still realize that your loneliness cannot be overcome, you will always remain as one mind.
On the opposite direction you could become part of the cloud brain unity, your consciousness a single neuron out of billions of other neurons making up the powerful over mind. But how powerful is the over mind when many become one, where does individuality lie? Is it like life in an office, individuals doing their tasks and injecting their creativity? Or more like a city, a city mind?
And that’s when you realize that this myth of evolution through technology is just that. The fundamental human strength and weaknesses remain on the most basic philosophical level.
The future then, looks much like the past. Kings and lords and ladies, bloodlines and lineages and infectious ideas that steer the course of humanity at large while being shockingly irrelevant in many important ways.
Do you like the ATTACK? Read MOAR @ https://medium.com/scifi-attack and check out https://medium.com/science-fiction-society for more legitimate storytelling :)
