[ExI] Wiki entry of Critical Theory of Posthumanism

[Kelly Anderson]

On Dec 5, 2011 10:39 AM, "Darren Greer" <darren.greer3 at gmail.com> wrote:

> About a year ago I was wandering around my house looking for something I
had misplaced. Audibly the thought occurred to me that I could just Google
to find out where it was. I marveled at what had just happened, and
realized that the Internet had dudes itself with my consciousnesses. It was
an extension of it, and its contents were now in fact my own memory,
amplified and expanded to a profound degree. It was at that moment that I
realized I was entirely ready and willing to move it into my brain, even
though the technology wasn't available yet, so I could search the database
for that misplaced ashtray.
>

my reply to this email is an experiment in using the voice recognition
software that comes on my new cellphone. the fact that a cell phone can
recognize the human voice this accurately is an indication of just how far
technology has come over the past few years. I am amazed by the
capabilities of this new phone, and I feel a little bit like Spike does
sometimes in having missed the revolution.

now to my main point...

about 15 years ago, I was working on a Sun workstation that had a monitor
with a loose stand. from time to time the monitor would slip and rotate
downwards. One day when it did this, I impulsively reached for the mouse,
and tried to fix the physical problem of the monitor location by moving the
mouse up. It didn't take me long to figure out that what I was doing was
not going to work. that was my first mental slip between the physical world
and the virtual world... and I found it very interesting from a mental
point of view. your belief that google could find items in your house seems
like a similar slip between physical and virtual worlds. I think this kind
of slip is going to become more and more and more common in the future and
as we spend more time in virtual worlds reality will become harder to
differentiate.

Kurzweil will have to wait for speech recognition to be the most ubiquitous
input modality for a few more years, but the capabilities available today
are really rather astonishing  even if they don't work flawlessly.

-Kelly
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