Friday, May 2, 2014

Surviving Technology

When I went to see "Terminator" in a theater in 1984 I remember being so moved from being both an intuitive and also having been a computer programmer and computer operator as my first profession beyond being a trained Electrician's Helper from age 12 to 17 summers with my father. I remember going out to the rest room trying to hide my tears from other people the movie had affected me so deeply.

I had just witnessed one of the potential ways the human race could be no more. Skynet.

The Terminator (1984) - IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt0088247/
Internet Movie Database
Rating: 8.1/10 - ‎419,725 votes
A human-looking indestructible cyborg is sent from 2029 to 1984 to assassinate a waitress, whose unborn son will lead humanity in a war against the machines, ...


However, as I thought about this tonight a more recent terminator called:

Terminator Salvation (2009) - IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt0438488/
Internet Movie Database
Rating: 6.7/10 - ‎222,121 votes
Videos. Terminator Salvation -- In the post-nuclear wasteland of 2018, John Connor ( · Terminator Salvation -- John aboard the sub being told that Skynet has a ...
 
was playing on TV at the hotel I'm staying at so I watched a little of it and thought of writing this piece here for you.
 
My first thought today might be different than what you might think. I don't necessarily think technology in itself is dangerous. What I really think is dangerous is paranoid people who are computer programmers programming in their paranoia and paid by governments to do this.
 
Though there motivations (the governments) might be very noble, something like (let's assassinate all terrorists) which sound good on the surface. However, look what we have right now from doing this in the world?
 
We have the knowledgeable harming the not so or not at all knowledgeable. This is just going to get worse over time.  Though I have been very knowledgeable throughout the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and up through about the early 2000s. I  found myself wanting to learn less and less about every new technology as a user simply because I knew from past experience that whatever I was learning about would become something else within 1 to 2 years. 
 
So, whatever you learn all about you likely will have to learn totally new things within 1 or 2 years as you progress through smartphones, PCs, Macbook Pros, Imacs, Tablets, Ipads, etc. 
 
However, as also an intuitive I would like to communicate about another aspect of all this which often is overlooked especially in Hollywood where people dying in odd ways often trumps reality which is usually very different than that.
 
If you look at tools (which all technology actually is) tools have been mostly our friends and our companions whether they were shovels, clubs, swords, bows and arrows, then ox carts, wagons, cars, planes, trains, ships, space ships etc.
 
So, if you see technology as a tool but also as a companion (like many men prefer their cars or trucks to women) because they cannot understand women. And even someone like me who is an intuitive even though it gives me an advantage over most men, it isn't completely perfect and at 18 (even though I had started dating at 15) my dream was to build a female Robot with beauty, finesse, intelligence and everything else a man might want in a companion and friend that I didn't find completely in women in 1966 when I was 18. I liked women but I thought I could design a better one that the models I saw then in my life. 
 
Even though I had matured by age 21 and realized a lot more than I did at 18 I still somewhere in my mind dreamed of building an ideal female companion that skied with me, rode motorcycles with me, climbed mountains with me and surfed and scuba dived and snorkel with me as we traveled the world together. 
 
However, eventually I met women that did all these things with me. But, suffice it to say it usually wasn't any one woman who would prefer to do all these things (even though my second wife was pretty amazing because she was a standby butterfly stroke swimmer for the Olympics. And so she snorkeled, and skied with me for years (15) until we broke up around 1994.
 
So, even though you might want to design a perfect woman in a robot that is your companion I'm not sure that is the most useful thing a person can do. You might just need to meet a whole lot of new women you haven't met before and that might solve your problem just like meeting more women over time made my life worthwhile along with having children along the way that I raised to adulthood and then traveled the world with. I'm still doing that by the way even in my mid 60s now.
 
This has all gone a different direction than I intended when I started but I think I'll stop writing now while I'm ahead.


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