The Post-Modern Prometheus
Silicon
worked well enough, for a while. Excellent for conventional computation, but
one could only do so much and there was so much more to do. Of course the
breakthrough took years. Naïve scientists believed faster and bigger and yet
more powerful machines were the
answer, and indeed for a while that was true. But now we know better: while
machines can and will continue to do the conventional drudgery, humans alone will
match the Gods.
Ah,
but not conventional humans!
The
breakthrough was heralded by Armand G Eddon, a reclusive and eccentric genius
far ahead of his time. His insight was that conventional humans only seem sluggish and stupid because their physical
and social environment is sluggish
and stupid. Thus if an artificially pristine environment could be created, human2
brains might be unleashed in the service of human1 pursuits, ushering a new era.
Of
course there was considerable resistance in beginning. The notion of a thousand
networked brain-pods grown from embryos of geniuses was repugnant to many, and
others refused for a while to believe that networked human2 brains could
function at such an astonishingly high level. But that was Armand Eddon’s insight:
freed of all the human1 burdens and distractions, including hands, legs, etc, networked human2 slave-clone synapses
grew to eclipse the machines with regard to truly
creative endeavors, while the machines continued to do what they do, leaving
human1 populations to do… Nothing!
