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Is Technology a Panacea for the Disabled?
osssmkatz asks: "I have lived all of my life with a physical disability, and have recently been beset by the typical claims that I am too obsessed by computers etc. This raises an important philosophical question for me. Throughout my life, technology has seemed a way around my limitations, but recently, I have become aware that it may not be. Is technology the ultimate panacea or does it, as Hamlet suggest, only seem to be so? I hope this question isn't too broad for Slashdot which has covered disability, technology and sociology issues in the past."
Those people raising objections entirely fail to realize the role of technology in the evolution of Mankind. Perhaps they should try reading Ray Kurzweil's insightful book "The Age of Spiritual Machines", or hang around on some of the power-thinking future engineering forums for a bit, to see where things are heading.
I can paraphrase it all for them very simply but rather bluntly: we are ALL disabled, because protein is a really crap technology.
It's not only that we will be able to do better than nature has done in due course. No, it's much more dramatic than that. We will ***HAVE*** to progress beyond what nature has given us, and become one with our post-protein technologies, because if we don't do that then in time we will no longer be the dominent intelligence on the planet --- our machines will be that instead, and we will be no more than very dumb pets.
This isn't the Matrix scenario at all --- this is the hopeful positive scenario where the machines are on our side, but with IQs in the thousands or millions.
Well, maybe a section of humanity will want to stay dumb and looked after by their benevolent machine masters in a comfortable zoo of their own making, but the signs are clear that they will be a very small minority, because each new generation is more comfortable with technology than the last, and pretty much nobody is happy with the concept of no longer being the dominant species here. Yet everyone wants more and more technology, the trend is irreversible.
Blind nature did what it did over millions of years very admirably, but its goals and mechanisms for the proliferation of species started to lose their relevance to Man quite a long time ago, and now natural evolution is simply out of its depth in a world where machines are becoming dramatically more powerful by the decade.
You don't need to extrapolate for very long to come to a future where the effective intelligence of machines (by simple brute force, not clever AI software) matches ours and then exceeds it by many orders of magnitude. And when that happens, there will be only two choices for Mankind: to either continue to be the masters by integrating with the technology, or to get left behind as lower-grade natural primates.
Perhaps the species will split into two at that point, who knows. All I can do is speak for myself --- I'm not interested in regressing back into the metaphorical treetops, and I'm perfectly happy with and even eager for machine converge. And I know I'm not alone.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
There are many people who's brains are either unable or are not very good at decyphering body language. People who are borderline autistic, and Jungian types such as INTJ (I'm one of them) fall into this category. For these people, talking over the internet is a relief from the daily embarrasing situations in real life. In text, you don't have to use the emotional processing parts of your brain to deduce if someone is happy by their facial expression. All you have to do is see, ":)". Simple.
Body language is a good thing for most people, but not all. The problem is that these 'most' people feel that the way they work applies to the rest of the human population. Body language is good, except when you can't interpret it correctly.