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Even if they don’t believe me, things are changing

Francisco Miraval

I came to the United States for the first time in 1985 to participate in a convention of religious leaders. I took the opportunity to visit my uncle, who at that time was living somewhere in New York state.

My uncle took me for a ride and, while he was driving in a highway (I do not know where), he set both the cruise control and the proximity radar on, and, because the highway was a long, straight line for many miles, he began to “read” a newspaper.

Back in Argentina, I shared that experience with my students at a philosophy class. I told them it was interesting to analyze what it meant to be inside a car with enough technology to allow you for some “distractions” without losing control of the car and without creating problems for the people inside the car.

My students did not believe me. In fact, some of them suggested I created the whole story based on a (at that time) popular television series. They said I only wanted to impress them.

Regardless, it was a real experience. All these years later, the technology my uncle used in his car is now obsolete and it has been replaced by new technologies providing even more protection for the car and for its occupants. (That should not be confused, of course, with an invitation to drive without paying attention.)

Then, at the end of the 1990s, when I was already living in the United States, I taught a class to small business owners. I mentioned at that time that the day would come when the radio in the cars would be replaced by computers. Those students did not believe me either. They said computers were too big to be part of a car and, in addition, computers were not needed for cars.

Nowadays, as we all know, a car without computers is basically an obsolete car.

In the first case, my students were unable to visualize or understand a technology they have never seen and they have never experienced. In the second case, my students wrongly assumed future technologies would be similar to present technologies. Whatever the case, and in spite of their protests and arguments, eventually they all discovered they were wrong.

For the past two years I have been teaching a philosophy class at a small, private university in Denver. In the context of that class, I began to focus on trans-humanism, that is, that moment –some say, in a matter of years– when humans achieve immortality turning into entities with holographic bodies and digital brains. When I mentioned that to my students, not surprisingly they did not believe me.

I do not know if there will be digital trans-humans in the near future. I cannot see the future. I do know, however, that in April 26, 2013, the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo announced the creation of a digital brain with 100,000, already being used by robots, even if you do not believe me.

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