Kenneth Leung

The idea of DARPA seriously exploring augmented human cognition both intrigued me and disturbed me. Alex's 20 minute DARPA film reminded me too much of films like,"Minority Report," "The Matrix," and "Ghost in the Shell."

All these film are my favorite simply because they begged the philosophical question of "What is man's relationship to technology?" and "Where are the paths of man and machine destined?"

Will technology be a conspiracy of faceless overlords?

Will technology be simple extensions of our abilities and nature?

Will we merge with technology to form a new state of existence?

Before I saw Alex's film I was really anxious to see how the film would attack these questions. After watching the film I was somewhat disappointed to see that DARPA felt that the future of man-machine interface was new window resize functions that use mental stress as input. I guess a mind-controlled UI would be somewhat better than dragging your mouse to the corner and resizing the window by hand. But, then again, this crack squad of commando nerds don't have time for such trivialities. I probably should also be relieve that DARPA doesn't have any plans to stick us with USB ports in our necks (i.e. Matrix) or above our tail bones(i.e. eXisTenz). I mean who really wants another hole to worry about.

If anyone else is interested in the destiny of man and machine check this link out:
technological singularity