Lost In Our Distractions

we love to be couch potatoes

Orwell's nightmare vision of our collective future, 1984, fortunately didn't come to pass; in part, because we were so scared it might. Yes, there are still dictatorships around the world, and some dictators have tried to make their control total (consider Pol Pot, for example), but there was a collective sigh of relief when we actually arrived in the year 1984.

However, the more accurate vision of our future appeared ten years or so before Orwell's book: Huxley's Brave New World.
Huxley argued that, rather than being controlled by our fears, we are controlled by our pleasures. The human species, he said, 'has an infinite capacity for distraction'.

Rather than get some work done, or achieve our goals, or practice self-discipline, we'd much rather be couch potatoes, be idle, and feed our pleasures.

With the rise of the Internet and mobile devices, we can now spend the whole day instagramming, facebooking, and whatsapping. Or we can spend the day wargaming, netflixing, or simply surfing.

Life is easy, life is fun, but we can oh so easily get bored. Work to do? That's boring. Goals to achieve? That's boring. Be self-disciplined? That's the most boring thing I've ever heard.

We live in an age of information and excitement at our finger tips; and we don't want to switch off. But we are already paying the price of information overload. Do you remember... 'Oh, what was his name?', 'Oh, I saw an article once...', 'There used to be a shop...'. Our devices have taught us to use our brains differently. We have already been rewired. We no longer memorise things; what we do now is remember where to find the things that we used to remember. That location is usually the Internet. But if the power goes off, what will we do?

Already, there are times when our shops or institutions can't function because they're momentarily 'offline'.

If we're not careful, humans themselves will become offline and more. That is in fact the prediction of some of our brightest thinkers: that an age of intelligent machines is coming, and once those machines become self-replicating, there will be no need for us; humans, it is suggested, will become redundant. Indeed, in an Age of Intelligent Machines, why would people be necessary or even useful? That has been a recurring idea of Science Fiction for a long time now; Asimov, for one, took the notion seriously in his fiction. Maybe it will soon progress beyond an idea.