The geek rapture of the Singularity is nothing if not an ending. Even for people who are in favour of the eternal acceleration, it's the end. What happens when people can turn themselves into something with the ability to alter society as much as a nuke? What happens when the technology means there is absolutely no need to pay anything but lip service to the society in which you find yourself? But nukes are nukes, held by larger bodies. Nukes have the ability to annihilate human society in an eye blink. 'Humanity: an animal on a little muddy ball with a nasty addiction to the steroid of technology'. And if it made us, will it destroy us? That's been the story since Prometheus, and if we observed humanity from a distance, I suspect it's the story aliens would tell about us. We've only ever been what our technology has made us. This is the fundamental story of humanity. And that power is only going to increase over time.Ĭommunal sighing for the loss of human achievement is misplaced. I appear more learned than I actually am by the power of a Google search. Frankly, after a prompt from Dan Griliopoulos, the previous two paragraphs are pretty much evidence of that. Today, I'd favour anyone with a basic understanding of Google over pretty much any scholar in matters of general knowledge. For the last century, I would favour your gran with a gun over any martial artist in the world. It was said, the Colt is the great equaliser. It's almost impossible to over-emphasise how much technology has made us titans. And as time goes by, at least in the industrialised world, we're all increasingly superhuman. And some of us always fear that the technology that is providing this power will also reduce us, to the point of ending us. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.' What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. 'If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

Let's take Plato's thoughts - through the mouthpiece of Ammon in his dialogues - talking about the very technology that allows him to reach us through the years: The written word allows Plato - 2400 years dead - to project his thoughts directly into the mind of anyone who bothers to read him.Īnd as technology changed what it meant to be human, people question its merits. And that in turn rests on the technology that made us more than human several thousand years ago, able to transmit thoughts across time and space. You could be in an office, or a beach, or a packed train or wherever, and my thoughts are being projected directly to you. Equally, unless you're crouched in the corner of my room, watching over my shoulder, you're reading this via an internet technology developed to avoid the hammer-footsteps of nukes instantly removing the military's ability to scream “Fucking hell! We're fucking fucked!” at each other when the bombs started wiping them out. Now, I sit with a hole in my belly, my physiology altered for the better as much as any of the cyborgs in Human Revolution. If this was 200 years ago, I would have died from the common appendicitis. I am able to write this today because the technologies of antibiotics and surgery were able to remove a malfunctioning organ when I was 24. We have been made more than human since our great n ancestor chimp picked up a rock and bashed the living shit out of something that was trying to kill it. This is a universal, perpetual theme that's interwoven with civilization. Human Revolution is a meditation on technology's ability to make us more than human, and the dangers (both perceived and actual) herein. (The following article contains spoilers to the very end of the game.) The new Deus Ex is about many things, but ranking high amongst them is DRM.

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