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Progress or Retrogression

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Progress or Retrogression
Progress or Retrogression?

“The only branch of science and math concerned with the ‘Limitations’ of Evolution.” As said by Taylor Kirkland on cybernetics: this is the science of evolution. As this occurs and as time goes on human development can only move forwards and as we see these changes happening right before us, one can only wonder if we’re heading in the right direction. As presented in the song “Mr. Roboto” written by Dennis DeYoung, “Mann and Machine” from Contemporary Canadian Biographies, and “Humans 2.0”, a blog entry posted by “zyxo” we see the positives and negatives that will become of this progress. These pieces represent to us both the good and the bad that would come form developing in this direction, the melding of man and machine. To this date the purpose of cybernetics is to drastically enhance human intelligence and perception but will this technology be taken too far completely “dehumanizing” its users?

Being that we are still at the beginning of a new era of technology: the progress we have seen up to now is clearly just the beginning. Current technology trajectories suggest that in the near future some form of technology will influence every person on earth. As of 2012, nearly 35% of the earths population area already using the Internet, not to say what percentage of people already own different types of technology. We see in “Humans 2.0” that Ray Kurzweil stated, “–within 20 years or so about everyone will walk around with computer stuff wired into their heads and within 40 years our natural brain power will only be a fraction of our total brainpower.” He is simply saying that within our lifetime the need to rely on our brain capacity for our knowledge will no longer be an issue. With this new computer technology we will only have to save this information to a memory file right inside of our own brains, as if we each had our own external hard drive. This technological development is also mentioned in the text “Mann and Machine”

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