If you were ever presented the chance to upload your consciousness into a machine would you take the opportunity? Would it be an action of last resort or would you be willing to leave the flesh behind once the technology was proven safe enough? These are interesting questions that should begin to creep into your mind. Why? Because whether we realize it or not, we are transferring our identities to the digital space and increasingly communicating through artificial interfaces.
As you stare at your black mirrors, you realize they too are part of your identity.
Who am I without my phone? Who am I without my computer? I'm simply another invisible man in a world that is slowly losing touch with its humanity. I can't remember the last day I spent in the absence of a screen. It must have been in grade school during a camping trip. But those days are long gone. The last time I went camping, I had a phone on me.
I'm a millennial. I'm just old enough to remember the days when interfaces did not dominate our lives. In some areas, they still do not. But I can see the future where we detach from the physical world into that of the digital. Where we become more machine than man. The future is bright from the screens of our interfaces.
Ten years from now, I imagine an ordinary mundane Monday. A family of four living in the middle class, living out a satisfactory life they can reasonably enjoy. Mom and Dad get up and go to wake the kids to get ready for school. The kids wake up, get dressed and go downstairs to find Mom and Dad scrolling on their tablets with breakfast ready.
The older child, a twelve year old boy, pulls out his tablet to watch cartoons as he eats. The youngest child, an eight year old girl gets her identical tablet and watches some her favorite music videos. After the meal is done, the group briefly communicates and acknowledges each other's presence before heading off to work and school.
Mom and Dad go to the home office where they plug into their interfaces and the kids go over to the living room and hook up to their interfaces. Mom and Dad are assigned work through AI assistants and the kids are taught through AI teachers that can adapt the coursework depending on each child's needs.
The group takes lunch and dinner breaks but continues to go back to their interfaces. In fact, they perform most of their communication on these interfaces. Hell, they seem like normal people when they talk and engage with other people through their interface. They spend a majority if not nearly all of their free time on their interface.
When it is time for bed, the kids disengage with their interface and go to their rooms to go to bed. The parents watch their favorite content together and talk about it through their interface and then outside of it before going to bed. They chat a little bit outside their interfaces and reminiscence about their relationship when they were younger. Maybe they should go out and explore the world more often. This is not the first time they have bought this up. And it won't be the last.
The world sometimes feels lonely without your interface. There have been times when I have noticed friends and family plugged into interfaces during different occasions and there have certainly been times I have wondered off into an interface rather than stick around in a physical conversation.
Maybe I need to unplug more often and re-sync with the physical world once again. Technology is changing us faster than ever, but sometimes these changes seem unsettling when you step back and take the time to analyze your situation.
Just imagine the virtual worlds we could lose ourselves in. The vast realm of opportunity that lies in an endless digital frontier than is bounded by the limits of human imagination. How long will it be before we go beyond screens and plug our minds into these interfaces? How long before we begin to detach ourselves from humanity to become digital representations, information free to conquer the digital world?
Who am I? Is it the person behind the screen typing or it the person that sits in front of your screen now talking to you. You are not hearing the words of a human being, but reading the digital thoughts of a digital person. While that digital person is under complete control of the man behind the computer screen, how long before the man behind the computer screen is controlled by the digital one that he created?
How long before all my friends will be digital people? How long until my best friend is a digital person? Is that relationship real? How long before we can no longer distinguish digital people from artificial intelligence? Until all my friends are simply computational simulations and the man behind the screen is no longer there. I have conquered the digital frontier, but I have lost my interface.
How long will it be until I realize that I can no longer plug out because I no longer exist and am simply information locked away waiting for someone real to respond?
Sources: Image