The Silicon Testament
that gives meaning to life. Ed Dickerson explains.
February 1, 2003; 1400 GMT. In Florida, families and friends of the Columbia astronauts wait on the reviewing stand near the airstrip where the space shuttle is scheduled to land in less than 20 minutes. Loudspeakers relay the communication between Columbia and Houston Mission Control: “We’re noticing an elevated reading on the sensor in your left wheel well.” “Roger, Houston, uh . . .” The link falls silent.
It would be 24 minutes before NASA would issue a statement. The families at the landing site could only wonder. Yet anyone with Internet access could read eyewitness accounts of Columbia’s break-up, and even see photographs of the shuttle’s fiery demise almost as it happened.
Years ago, before wireless telephones, before the PC, before the World Wide Web, author and futurologist Marshall McLuhan wrote of the “global village” being forged through modern communication. Today we live in that reality.
Writing at my desk in a rural area, my personal computer plugged in to the World Wide Web, I have databases, search engines, catalogues of famous paintings and cars for sale literally at my fingertips. Instant messaging someone several time zones away, emailing anywhere in the word and viewing real-time video from exotic locations form part of my daily routine.
If I need a Shakespeare quote, I could resort to my “Complete Works” volume in the nearby bookcase, but it’s quicker to access a search engine in Britain, on the other side of the planet. Should I decide to view live video from Mars, I could visit a space science web-site. In 1999, the Everest Internet Expedition sent live video to the world via the Internet from the world’s highest mountain. People anywhere in the world might have tapped into that feed and viewed the top of the world from their favourite easychair.
You would think that flood of information could make understanding ourselves and the purpose of our existence easier. It occurred to me that, with all the gigabytes of data at our fingertips—our “Silicon Testament”—surely I could find the answers to my most important questions.
So I tried it. I entered my name into one of the most popular search engines. It was like looking into a fun-fair mirror; an image of myself (along with some others who share my name) distorted, truncated; a different view, certainly, but nothing new. Just so much data, good and not so good. But did I find meaning, answers to the great questions of our existence—“Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?”—no.
Something strange has taken place. We have more affluence, more ease, more leisure, more time to reflect, and more information. We have access, directly through travel, and indirectly via the Internet and modern communications, to more of the world than ever before. Yet, searching this torrent of information leaves us more alienated rather than less.
This tidal wave of change has come upon us so quickly that most of those who unleashed it still live. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, lives and teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Carver Mead, called the Prophet of the Silicon Compiler, at Cal Tech. Then there’s the newly knighted Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and the sometime richest man in the world. They can explain the design and purpose of technology, but can they help us to find meaning in our lives?
Strangely, some of the very individuals who enjoy explaining the complexity of all this technology, how many hours of design and testing it took to produce these devices and applications, will still tell you humans evolved from nothing! According to this view of things, computers and software require brilliant designers, while the computer’s infinitely more complex designers “just happened.”
No wonder we feel alienated. In a world of intricately designed and fabricated devices, created for the purpose of making our lives better, only we humans have no meaning—for what does an “accident” mean? No matter how long the chain of accidents, they still just happened, lacking purpose and devoid of meaning. As the computer wizards put it, “GIGO—garbage in, garbage out!” If what you put into the system makes no sense, what comes out won’t either.
Where can we look for meaning in our lives? As we’ve seen, the computers, the Internet and technology cannot address the cosmic questions of identity (Who am I?), history (Why am I here?) and destiny (Where am I going?).
| This is an extract from September 2004
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