You Are Not Alone. You Are on Team Human.
In this closing excerpt from Team Human, Rushkoff calls on us to “Find the Others”
Human beings can intervene in the machine. That’s not a refusal to accept progress. It’s simply a refusal to accept any particular outcome as inevitable.
Team Human doesn’t reject technology. Artificial intelligence, cloning, genetic engineering, virtual reality, robots, nanotechnology, bio-hacking, space colonization, and autonomous machines are all likely coming, one way or another. But we must take a stand and insist that human values are folded into the development of each and every one of them.
Those of us who remember what life was like before these inventions remade the landscape have a duty to recall and proclaim the values that are being left behind.
Our values — ideals such as love, connection, justice, distributed prosperity — are not abstract. We have simply lost our capacity to relate to them.
Values once gave human society meaning and direction. Now this function is fulfilled by data, and our great ideals are reduced to memes. Instead of consciously reenacting the essential, mythical truths of our existence, we track aggregate opinion and stoke whatever appetites guarantee the greatest profit.
