I’m back from NYC and you know what I saw a lot of? People who had merged with machines. Yes, a few of these were freaky cyborgs, like cars with human heads, or cats with little computers embedded in their brains and controlled remotely by their human owners. Vastly outnumbering these folks, though, were more-or-less normal people with earbuds stuffed into ears, staring into their phones and tap-tap-tapping out SMS messages to their friends as they walked the Manhattan sidewalks.
It’s easy to have what I think of as an “old school” reaction to this, namely, that it’s retarded, and that those damn kids don’t need to be in minute-to-minute contact with each other. And that’s true, as far as it goes. But what’s also true is that the human race is changing. It’s just happening more obviously in New York. I’m told it’s more extreme in Asian cities like Tokyo and Seoul, but I’m in no position to say.
I know this sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn’t. Humans have been fusing with their technology since writing was invented, and maybe before that. The problem is that till now it’s been too slow to see. But think of this: what’s my phone number? I’ve had the same one since 2002. I bet none of you knows it unassisted, and I can verify that I don’t know any of yours except for Monica’s. And yet I still know that Chad Regnier’s number, twenty-five years ago, was 612-441-4266. Something changed, and what changed was the off-loading of certain cognitive loads onto technology.
Kevin Kelly talks about another aspect of this idea on his site.
Where is my stuff? If I google my own mail to find out what I said, or rely on the cloud for my memory, where do “I” end and it starts? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of interest, and all my notes, and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes — if all this is sitting somewhere — but nowhere in particular — it changes how I think of myself. What happens if it were to go away? A very distributed aspect of me would go away. If McLuhan is right that tools are extensions of our selves — a wheel an extended leg, a camera an extended eye — than the cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.
These are chasms between old-humanity and new-humanity that have emerged in the last five years. Change is speeding up. Humans and their machines are fusing, faster. I wonder what’s next.