The world as we know it today will
soon disappear. We are constantly being
pulled into a void, a new creation, that's only just begun to emerge. Formed by our own hands, we shape its destiny;
the future of which is limitless, awesome, and profound. But the problem plaguing this creation is
that there so many architects behind it, a very few foremen managing the work,
and an army of laborers toiling furiously to... well, nobody knows. Of course I'm referring to the very media in
which I'm conveying this message, the vast unknown of ones and zeros that make
up the building blocks of this brand new world.
Electronics, which were once a
convenience, now run our lives more than ever, and their manufacturers' are
furiously fawning over themselves to find more ways to get us to immerse
ourselves in their products. They are
selling computers, phones, consoles, apps, games, media and appliances. Heck, they are even selling us cars, homes,
and an occasional space flight. This is
only the beginning, and depending on your point of view, it's not necessarily a
bad thing. Imagine what good we can do
if we start putting the pieces together, imagine a world where a hospital
tweets that it has a heart available from a donor and lets every other hospital
around know immediately? Now, imagine
that there is a dying mother two hundred miles away in need of it, and instead
of driving it for 3 hours, or chartering an expensive plane, you send the heart
off in one of those make-shift Kinect helicopters that guides itself to the
recipient on its own? Then when it gets
there, it's retrieved by R2-D2, and then surgery is performed by C-3PO. Yeah, yeah, it's a stretch, but that's part
of the reality we face when planning for the future.
Common sense is something that we,
as a human race, seemed to have overlooked for many years. We all will disagree on many things, but
there is some base understanding, something common that we can all share even
in the most difficult of problems. In
order to get to the root of any problem, we must strip down it's complexities
and make sense of the very core of the issue.
Often, it's very easy, but it requires you to look past the obvious, the
solutions on the surface that only treat the symptoms but not the disease. And if humanity is to thrive in an era
charged with confronting some of the most difficult challenges ever thrust on
us, a little common sense won't hurt.
June 12, 2011
June 12, 2011
