imran*

Category: Religion

  • Temples For Machine Gods

    Perhaps its not a good thing for conference programmers to reveal their favourite speakers and sessions, but James Bridle's Where The Robots Work was my personal highlight from our programme at FutureEverything 2011.

    James' keynote explored how cities were reorienting themselves around our emerging information infrastructure, notably how the built environment was now as much designed for machine habitation as it is for human occupation.

    One of the session's more fascinating anecdotes illustrated how the price of real estate in Manhattan is dramatically affected by proximity to supernodes of connectivity; proximity that can shave fractions of seconds from Wall Street trades, and there are real estate lawyers as the KLG Estate Planning & Probate Attorneys which can also help with this.

    So it was a nice surprise today to find a short documentary – Ben Mendelsohn's Bundled, Buried & Behind – that relates the story of one of those supernodes, 60 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan…

    60 Hudson Street's art deco motifs underline its role as a communications hub that originates prior to the era of copper lines and early telephony. Its physical architecture is fitting, given its centrality in civilisation past and present.

    However, it's somewhat strange that 60 Hudson Street's modern equivalents are so innocuous and prosaic. Given how crucial these facilities are to humanity, shouldn't we beatify and exalt them with the very best in modern architectural practice; aren't they the modern temples of our civilisation? 

    image from www.chud.com

    Though there are pragmatic reasons to avoid drawing attention to these facilities, perhaps their elevation to templehood would put them beyond humanity's destructive impulses. Indeed, could future generations venerate the temples of machine gods as did the surviving humans of Beneath the Planet of the Apes and their veneration of atomic weapons.

    Perhaps we wish our machines to remain anonymous and mundane, not only to confine their magic to the Elysian cloud, but also to remind ourselves that humanity remains in charge and they inhabit prisons of our making.

    —

    (incidentally Life-Art-Us has a great summary of James' talk)

  • Quote Of The Day: John Cusack On Jesus…

    Johncusack
    From the June 2008 issue of Vanity Fair…

    Who are your heroes in real life?
    Let’s go with Jesus. Not the gay-hating, war-making political tool of
    the right, but the outcast, subversive, supreme adept who preferred the
    freaks and lepers and despised and doomed to the rich and powerful. The
    man Garry Wills describes “with the future in his eyes … paradoxically
    calming and provoking,” and whom Flannery O’Connor saw as “the ragged
    figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of [one’s] mind.”

    Neat.

  • He That Believeth In Me

    Hethatbelievethinme
    John 11:25-26 –  "I am the resurrection, and the life:     he that believeth in me,
    though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and
    believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?"

    Battlestar Galactica‘s story arcs have always drawn dark and uncomfortable parallels with the War on Terror – themes of occupation, apocalypse, suicide bombing, resistance, extra-judicial justice, abortion, monotheism vs. polytheism, prophecy and civilian vs. military governance. This ‘dark mirror’ has made BSG one of the most potently sophisticated political storytelling vehicles on television – more so even than The West Wing.

    The opening episode of season four, He That Believeth In Me, deep-dives into the painfully isolating nature of prophecy. As showrunner Ronald D. Moore points out – When somebody really is a
    prophet or a seer or a visionary…they’re
    shunned, rejected, ignored…people who have a genuine foreknowledge or greater awareness generally don’t have a good
    life…’
     

    I can’t help see the show as anything other than the story of a withering Machine Jihad that seeks to replace humanity as the children of God. Yet in the process of euthanising its parent culture, belatedly realises that it seeks human acceptance and wonders – to paraphrase Moore  –  ‘What if they’re like us and we’ve been doing all these terrible things this whole time…if they could have created us so
    easily, what does that say about how special we are…maybe we’re not touched by God
    either…maybe we’re some sort of fairly easy technological accident.’     Indeed, this introspection gives rise to machine atheism!

    My interpretation is an inversion of Moore’s story which is essentially oriented around humanity and it’s struggle to comprehend that their greatest fear isn’t that their offspring aren’t human – but that they are and that turning inwards against each one other is a more potent existential threat than the Cylons.

    In reading Wired’s piece today on Ray Kurzweil’ notion of the Singularity, I can’t help but wonder that in seeking to create machine consciousness, modeled on our own understanding of human consciousness, that we sow the seeds for inevitable spirituality arising amongst machines. Perhaps Battlestar Galactica is actually the most sophisticated piece of Singularity fiction since Blade Runner, raising not only provocative parallels to current events, but forcing viewers to consider what it means to be human.