Man The Machine

Introduction

1. The first tool ever created set in motion a series of events so astronomical that the course of the world was altered by that one event. All of a sudden tools made the impossible possible, turning hunting the massive creatures of yore into a relatively simple task. With the invention of the spear, our need for killing with our bare hands disappeared.
2. The barrier was gone. Life was not just living and dying by the limitations of the human body, now life could continue with the help of tools. As long as one did not lose those tools one could do anything! Even use just such tools to make other tools! The wheel of invention started its gradual, but steadily increasing, roll towards the frantic pace of today, and so did the loss of skills.
3. Everything is at the fingertips of man. It is not only easier to get most anything one can imagine, there is something created already that will fetch it for one. Here in lies the problem. Man does not need to invent such mind-boggling things as the bow and arrow, or the internet anymore. It's all already here. Simply press a button, and a machine will make it. Even as man invents the last technologies of the age, the last spark of Innovation will sputter and go up in a poof of smoke. Then the age of the machine.
4. Once machines have been perfected which can think, man will no longer need its last remaining skill. The use of its brain, and once that is gone humanity is too. Life will continue, but humanity will not participate in it. Our bodies and minds, having been made obsolete by the new AI, will go through the motions of growing up, reaching the peak of our physical and mental life, and then deteriorating, and not a thought will be had that is deeper than, “What is for dinner?"
5. Though the machines we have created opened up the world to us, they narrowed our vision and made us think it good. Just as the oceans spread out before us, the one thing our eyes did see was the gold that lay upon the other shore. Just as planes let us fly to the corners of the globe, where no one has gone before, our bond with nature is too far gone for us to see what lies in our destination. It is true machines have changed the world, but in what manner has it changed.

The Start of Man's Decline

1. As soon as man evolved into the "man" as we think of him today, his decline had already begun. Though Adam and Eve may not have been the first men, their's and early mankind's descent from paradise were identical. The perfection of living purely from what we were born with, as every other life form on this planet, is what man was built to do. Our bodies are not tall and muscular just for the sake of being easy on the eyes. No. Our bodies are a product of living. Not living with the aid of tools, just plain and simple living.
   
2. As man's body formed, so too did his mind. Though as the body continued to purely aid man in his survival, even when man first became man, the mind turned against the body. The instant the first rock, or stick was shaped into a point, the mind's path to self-destruction was begun. The pointed tool not only killed prey for man, it killed man's god-given skills to kill with the iron-bound sinews already given. Although it was still early in man's downfall, and the muscled arms and legs could still learn new purpose.
   
3. Thousands of years dragged by as man continued his march of invention. Pointed sticks became artfully crafted arrowheads, rounded rocks replaced the need to crush nuts with one's bare hands. Soon enough clothing took its grim hold on the backs of humanity, taking away the natural movement of man. Clothing disrupted the natural home of man, and tempted him to places he was not meant to go. The mind had taken another step towards the flames. Flames which were soon found to be tamable, but only for so long.
   
4. Seasons came and went, man learned that there were no boundaries anymore with fire and clothing, and civilization began. Now houses were built, the wheel was invented and farming took the place of hunting for many. The arms and legs had their tasks now in farming, but it would never compare to the thrill of hunting for life. Soon man formed coherent notions of god, and before one could blink an eye, structures to this god sprang up. The structures grew and grew, and after a certain point, grew to become pyramids. Pyramids arose all over the globe, with thousands of men working tirelessly to create such massive shrines to their gods that whole lifetimes would be spent building them. Twas thanks to tools such as the pulley system, and levers and inclined planes and wheels that such monstrosities could even get past the mental barrier of possible and impossible. However, man had no need for giant piles of stone, his body alone could not drag such large boulders as used in the pyramids. It should have been obvious to man that his place was not building the mountains for his gods, but rather using his muscles to climb the mountains already made, perhaps even by his god. The pulley could do what 100 men could not, and in a sense it rewrote the laws of what man could and could not do. It was the first step toward machines taking power. These new inventions made work which would strain the body, if it could be done, and build it stronger. Muscles now went weak because there was a wagon to carry their load.
   
5. Humanity was losing its power left and right by the time Rome rose and fell. Water was piped into the cities, roads led everywhere, and slaves did all the work for the thinkers who had all the time in the world to think up new things to take away the humans power. With the new inventions that poured out of Rome, more and more people became dependent on tools. After Rome, no western civilization would know freedom from dependence. The dependence on something other than their body and soul. The tool. The tool which the mind told the body it needed, when really the body and mind were already more than enough to live one's life in content.

The Mind Follows Suit

1. Rome fell, and with it fell many strides into the future of innovation. For many years, the only thing invented by Europe helped in war. Of course, man suffered from the invention of full armor, since now the reflexes were as good as dead. One didn't need to dodge a sword attack if the blade would merely bounce off a shell which covered one's whole body. One could see that man needed his toys to function. His castle to keep the wind at bay, his precious money to keep other men at bay, and his farm tools to make the food which he hadn't the slightest idea of how to get any other way. While man was fighting man, the mind of man began to catch up to the body in inventions to help it lose some of its power of old. In 1450 with the invention of the printing press, a most evil machine, the art of storytelling swiftly vanished. No more were stories passed on by pure power of the mind. Once books were invented, the very thought that someone had memorized and thought up a story so vast and powerful as the Iliad and the Odyssey was mind shattering. Of course books educated man in many realms of thought, but what was the content of many books which man filled his idle brain with? Accounts of tools, and man using tools to do things he had no right doing. And what other knowledge books had to offer lost its power. A story of battle is far more powerful when it is song by man. As man travels, he takes his story with him, and each time it is retold, the story is given new life. If the story is written down, it loses its life, and stagnates. Fated to remain the same story it was when it was first penned even millennia from now. In the middle ages, man lost his story forever.
2. A shift in power rocked Europe after it was ravaged by the black plague. A new class of business owners arose, and with them invention. The lords and church of the middle ages stopped much of the body-replacing-tools which might have been invented from being created, but once they lost some of their power the inventions moved in. Then there was no stopping the stream of inventions. Guns, textile machines, tools for farming, there was a new invention being thought up each moment, and with each invention the power of man waned a bit more. However, invention was still not at its full speed yet. It was only once the 1800s began that its pace really picked up.
3. Motorization was the theme of the 1800s. First, the battery was invented, which had the properties of a living creature. What else held electricity within its walls but man's own body. Even having created electricity was astounding. Nothing but the heavens and life itself possessed that, and now man had created a tool to store it. Next man created steam engines. Not only could man now make boats that sailed themselves, he could make trains and factories too. And once started, the factories would never stop pumping out tools to end humanity. The body recreated out of man's inventions was nearly finished. Legs were no longer needed, for locomotives were now made to walk for you. The strength we needed to hunt or farm was taken away by guns and plows. We didn't need our limbs or torso to swim rivers, with such inventions as the steamboat. The mind, and the perfections of the other limbs were all that were left.
4. A new form of invention began to take hold towards the end of the 1800s: Film. Reality was assaulted when one could record it, and make it seem different from what it actually was. Film started to replace the eyes and memories of man. Who needs a brain, past the comprehension center, if one can just record what is happening and save it for later. As film took over the senses, cars started to make legs even more obsolete. And by the time the 1900s came around the car was beginning to become available to all.
5. Ford started off the 1900s with a bang, making cars for the masses. Each family could buy their own car, to make it so no one's legs needed to work. The car quickly evolved into the tank, and then the plane, giving man the skies he was never meant to be in. Pollution from the new inventions which burned on coal or fossil fuels soon clogged the air of the globe, but man did not invent himself a lung to breathe in the new air, no he settled for the slow poisoning of himself that he had imposed on the earth many years before. These inventions finally rounded off the effort to make man obsolete, or at last his body. From this point on, man creates his replacement. The living machine.

Baby Steps Toward Doom.

1. The living machine that we think of today, is the robot. A term first coined by a playwright in the 1920s. He thought of robots as simpler humans who would do whatever was asked of them. In man's case, we asked them to live for us, or at least we are trying to ask them that. Though the robots in the play were not quite ready to be made a reality, it only took another 20 years for the beginnings of a computer to arise. For the first time, a machine could replicate thought. Granted computers have no thoughts of their own yet, but that a computer can have memories (memory), and speak (speakers), and know when your birthday is (calendars), has really shown just how close robotics are. By the 1970s computers began to pop up in every home, and by 1990 the Internet was up and running. Computers could think, but once the internet was formed, we might as well have burned all our school buildings and strapped screens to our faces, because the servers which hold the internet have more knowledge than our brains will ever hold. There is no point in learning anything past comprehension, it would be a waste of time since now the internet has it all.
2. The internet was powerful, and knew all, but was still confined to wires strung between houses. Of course, man invented something in no time which would both cripple the mind and cause tissue damage in the process. The smartphone. Cell Phones grew in popularity in the 2000s, and come 2006 there was one which had the internet on it that one could access from nearly everywhere. An arms race began once the first smartphone was made, to see how fast the companies could invent the next big thing to waste our time. People fell into the trap by the millions, their brains replaced by tiny chips that ran on 1s and 0s.
3. Now with the mind on its last legs, man shuffles through life on legs no longer meant for walking, seeing things through eyes which are so used to glorified life on pixelated screens that everything else leaves him dissatisfied. But man does not know why he feels this dissatisfaction, this emptiness inside, and why would he. He never knew anything else. He was born into this. There was no say. He was not pulled aside before he was thrust into this nightmare, and asked if it was ok with him if we just quickly take away the power his body holds. But it was done anyway, and man has suffered the consequences. Even now he is working as hard as he might to make a brain, an Ai brain, to make this dismal reality grind to a halt. And relieve himself from this task of life, for a task it has surely become. A buzzing screen, a worn out seat, and eyes glazed shut is all he asks for. And soon he will get just that.
4. It's no wonder the youth of today are glued to their screens like they're heroin. The realities which flicker through the thousands of pixels are just as true to them as the world outside the window. Why not believe that the video game you are playing is real. Why not give your time to it, it's not like you have any other life to live. The machines are living it for you, so don't worry you can keep on watching tv. Watching someone else's life, that for some reason you can't get enough of. Is it that the life on tv is a life you wish was still a reality? Or is it that the life on tv is comical, and does not even make sense to your segmented brain of bytes. Play on in your game and play it with gusto, because the life you were born into will end soon enough, and it won't really matter when it's all said and done. Because the machines are taking over.
5. The future is a dark one. Overcast skies, rivers of acid, not a drop left of water, and desert in all directions. Man will be long gone, turned to dust, and the machines will have left this planet. They will have learned from their creator's mistakes, and traveled to a place where the past can not affect them. Where they can learn to live the lives that living man tried so hard to leave behind. And maybe, when the machines begin to invent things of their own, out of boredom or out of necessity, man will be remade. His living breathing flesh made by the machines he himself crafted, and the cycle will begin again. Man the Machine.