The Fall of Man

Notes on a week — October 16, 2016

If you’ve watched the first two episodes of HBO’s new series Westworld, you’ve been asked to consider a series of deeply philosophical questions that extend far beyond an expanation for why the player-piano performs selections from one of my own iTunes playlists. If you havent watched the series, don't worry, it’s not really required viewing for this week’s column.

At the core of the series (so far), beyond its future of androids being built for our pleasure, or its examination of humanity’s desire for distraction, or our tendency toward vice and violence, seems to be a major question which tips the show away from being science fiction and makes it highly predictive futurism:

Is technology more naturally succeptible to malfunction due to its human design and its requirement to interact with humans, or does it eventually malfunction because we mistreat it as yet another thing destined for the trash heap?

This is perhaps the most important technological question of our time, even though Michael Crichton asked it with the original Westworld in 1973.

How we use and abuse technology is actually a really significant thing to explore; consider that the big news with this year’s updated iPhone — the flagship device from the world’s largest technology company — is that they removed several components to improve the device’s durability and waterproofing because humans cant seem to stop dropping their smartphones in the pool.

Crichton was always a master at asking these kinds of questions — indeed Jurassic Park famously pointed out that what some call discovery could also be seen as “the rape of the natural world,” and that we traditionally fail to ask ourselves if we should pursue progress just because we have the capability to do so.

What I do know is that with the growing proliferation of Augmented and Virtual Reality-based technology, we’re facing this future far sooner than we think.

What concerns me most about our species is that we’ve seemingly lost our ability to recognize our responsibilities to the technologies and systems we create:

• by focusing less on governance and more on politics, we’ve had a global breakdown of traditional elections
• instead of developing better industries and practices for how we use our consumer electronics, we’ve created new industries devoted to either fast repairs or large-scale disposal, and created even more waste in the process
• the quest for alternative energy sources, or more accurately new ways to harness and access outdated energy sources has lead to major environmental catastrophes

Westworld is still an episodic series that best represents television (it’s not TV, it’s HBO…) so I’m not sure if it’ll ever really be able to provide answers to that major question up above, but I think that’s kind of the point.

We as a species have to stop arguing about the merits of Google vs. Apple, or Hybrid vs Traditional Energy and start asking ourselves if we’re respecting the awesome power and responsibility that comes with discovery, progress and technology. Can we stop mindlessly, endlessly consuming and instead turn toward a more mindful and responsible use of our systems and technology?

If we don’t, we’re not just facing an inevitable world of androids and augmented or virtual realities, we’re also facing an absolute inevitablity that that things we create will most definitely kill us in lots of large and small ways.

Odds and Ends:

• I posted a really fun episode of my my weekly music series, Shuffle and Repeat, all about the tragic figures in music’s 27 club — the famous artists who died at the age of 27.
• I’m also still selling merch to support both the series, and an incredible charity that brings music to people with neurological diseases and helps them find comfort and joy. Head over to the newly launched store to check out the merch, which I hand-drew on my own, by the way.

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