I am doing a Masters - I am in the major writing and big thinking part of my essay development. My supervisor Professor Ian Weeks (Deakin, Melb. Uni) is pushing me to consider what are the limits of technology, where do we stop, does everyone get a pacemaker just in case?
When does technology become magic and when it does what inflexible gnostic thinking develops that stymies any chance of a hope that is truly human.
There is also the consideration if everyone gets prosthesis and extensions where does the person end and the technology begin? Where did Stephen Hawking begin and the machine end when the only voice so many people know as the voice of Hawking being the digitally produced one?
In the middle of this are the fictional texts I have chosen to assist me Shelly's Frankenstein, Huxley's Brave New World and (no joke) Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Along with them is an investigation of the Hebrew and Greek usages of Hope.
These are a precious resource which reveal that when it comes to hope our outlook on ourselves, each other and even God reveal a struggle that requires us to hold on to a hope that we build and strive for. What is amazing is that the processes of hope and the human activity to attain hope are so similar to investigative process of what we now call science.
I wrote about this type of scientific investigation earlier this year using the Disney show Phineaus and Ferb as my example.
Though there is another that is on TV this weekend Mythbusters Jr. which has the classic line that applies to all of life "failure is always an option".
We do need to look outside the our realm to achieve the hope we need/want but often we do not get their, but, as Descartes understood we still arrive somewhere. It may not be what we expected but we still learn and from this, we grow. Do not think you will win all the time. That is the final lesson.
You cannot mix your hope with hopelessness to do this you end up in the place of Icarus reaching for the sun and loosing your hope. This is not the end ….
Phillip Hall is currently writing an essay about hope and technology for The University of Divinity. Jacques Ellul's book The Technological Society is core to this essay. Techniques are central to our lives and sport is merely one of them. How we live with technique? Now that is the challenge.