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The brain — self-consciousness — is the first supercomputer, a long-emerging evolutionary mistake that leaves us more vulnerable than if we had just remained hyper-predatory calculating killing-machines. I can’t help but wonder if the generation of supercomputers we’re building, will evolve, eventually — perhaps long long after my lifetime — into self-conscious consciousnesses like us? I wonder when the first computer suicide will be.
This is an odd thought to have on November 7th. I remember taking the subway the day after Trump was elected, and feeling an utter, 1933-esc despair. The world seemed grey and fascistic, even in New York City (and to a degree, it still does). But in the intervening two years, I’ve started to feel that the deep past and the deep future are more frightening than the stark present, and more interesting. Whatever you can say about the 2016–2018 period, nothing truly BIG has happened. No plagues, no wars, no space travel, no tectonic shifts in power. Lots of pawns have fallen — lots of little grimnesses have set in — but the EVENT is… either still to come, or not coming in the course of this historical moment.
To my mind, the last major event was in 2008 — it was the release of the first smartphone in the United States (not the election of President Obama). Everything that has happened after — everything politically — it is a outward ripple from the date that brains…
