I wanted to give my view of what seems to be a facile premise, the title of my eBook, the title of this blog. When Do I Get To Live My Own Life? applies to teenagers and children, right? Every adult is way beyond that stage of life, right?
I thought a good demonstration of how difficult it truly is for anyone to live their own life would be to take evidence from a person considered to be an extremely developed and mature public adult, and look at their life through some themes of the eBook. The opportunity presented itself earlier this week as I read Ray Kurzweil’s 2010 updates of predictions made in his three books: The Age of Intelligent Machines; The Age of Spiritual Machines; and the 2005 The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
Ray Kurzweil is the child of two Holocaust survivors, as he notes in the first page of the Prologue of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. When I first read The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology three years ago, I was struck by page after page where the underlying feeling was to deny death. The feeling I remember was that the author was made to feel exactly what his parents felt during their ordeals. His parents’ feelings to hold on against death were understandably so strong that once his parents were released, denying death continued to ruled their lives, and since then, the life of their child. The author, in my view, was compelled to invent ways that humans will transcend their biology.
I was also struck by page after page where Ray Kurzweil explicitly or implicitly expresses the book’s subtitle, that it is a desirable condition to be split off from human feelings and biology – “substrate” in his terms. In my view, this is again part of the person the author became because of his history. How else could his parents have survived their ordeals except to dissociate themselves from their realities?
Ray Kurzweil, like all of us, became the person his parents made of him at a very young age. A premise of When Do I Get To Live My Own Life? which is discussed in detail in my first eBook, Getting Well for the First Time, is that each of us is stuck at that early level of personality development. We do not grow out of the person our circumstances made us just because we grow older or accomplish multiple tasks in the world.
I read the specifics of the 2010 updates of his predictions with this framework. The author’s overriding thesis is that once a technology becomes an information technology, it conforms to characteristics of other information technologies. A primary feature of an information technology is that it grows exponentially.
It only takes until page 2 of the 146-page update to read the first instance of the disdain the author displays for his body, where he reduces what humans are by referring to us as “obsolete software.” He already shows that he prefers to have an identity that is split off from its human origins.
The remaining 144 pages are fascinating details of how the author was right in most of his technology predictions. This is certainly laudable in a scientific way, to uncover facts over time, relate the facts to test hypotheses, and advance theories based on the provable results.
I have to wonder, though, where the compulsion to always be “right” comes from. When I interact with people who have this compulsion, I always wonder what happened to them in their early lives. Who or what ingrained in them the feeling of “wrongness” so deeply that they spend the rest of their lives in a battle against this feeling?
I heartily endorse the research the author has made into a wide range of areas. Everyone should be interested to see the details of the power of technology as it increasingly transforms all aspects of our lives. Some of the details presented as of the end of 2010 have predictably and noticeably shifted now that we’re at the end of 2011.
I hope I’m not being unfair to focus on how I view the difficulty another person has in living their own life, one that’s not of their parents’ making. I write ten personal stories as examples in When Do I Get To Live My Own Life? if you want to read about me.
I understand Ray Kurzweil’s perspective of presenting his research as his way of acting out his past. He, like the rest of us, in my view, won’t understand who other people really are until he understands the truth about himself. In my view, he doesn’t see that humans are already more than what his future predicts they will be.
My questions for the new year are: What do we want out of advances in technology? Do we need technology to develop more ways to dissociate ourselves from who we are? Let me know by voting, rating, and commenting, or by any way you want.
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. She designs book covers, and is always participating in one blog tour or another. She’ll whip your teenager’s butt in the MMOG of their choice, and, of course, she interviews authors. You name it, she does it well!
