The Human First Manifesto (Part IV)

The Writing on the Wall (footnote 8)

          In the mid-20^th century, human beings just start to see where their obsession with technology can take them and just how dangerous it could be. Books like 1984 by George Orwell “portray a chilling world in which computers are used by large bureaucracies to monitor and enslave the population” (Kurzweil). It is meant as something of a cautionary tale to warn against certain kinds of technology. William Gibson also warns of the dangers of technology in his novel Neuromancer (1984) where a computer, Wintermute, has intentions and thoughts of its own and they are quite contrary to the purpose for which it was made. Another example of this is The Matrix, a 1999 film by the Wachowskis. In it, human beings are enslaved by those that they have created. They are forced to serve as batteries for the hideous machines and are fed into a fantasy world where they have no control over their lives. Movies like The Terminator (1980), by James Cameron, also show a world where AIs have taken our shape and appearance and use what we have created against us. This film shows how human beings rise up a take back our world.

         

But what we HuFis say is that this time should never come, should never have been given a chance to come and will never come if it is up to us. All of these works of fiction show the intelligent minds of the time warning us against the future we were so willingly marching into. They show that human beings knew the dangers of the technologies we were creating. These were not small, unknown pieces of work, they were seen and read by millions of people. These brilliant innovators knew what our dangerous obsession with technology could lead to and what might have come.

          And yet, here we are today…

Footnote 8: This section is made up of fictional works, even in the world of HuFis and Machies. They are works of fiction that show the negative sides of technology.