The Human Resistance Report

Its simply not enough for robots to take human jobs… now they have to take jobs from defenceless animals.  Just recently a zoo in St Louis replaced their Polar Bears with electronic versions of the arctic  animals. Having trouble keeping the bears alive for a variety of reasons over the years, they have given up and  elected to put an electronic bears in its place. Its unlikely that they will fool anybody , but I guess an avatar of a bear is better than an empty spot in the zoo.

I can’t help but to wonder though if this is not an analogy for what is really happening on a larger scale. The bears are endangered to begin with , and have a hard enough time surviving in the wild. Clearly they have  an  even harder time staying alive in human captivity. The bottom line is that they are not surviving. No problem – technology to the rescue!  Just replace them with electronic versions and you have yourself a rehabilitated species.

 As time goes on children who look at electronic animals will think that’s just how zoos are supposed to look, and as animatronics get better and artificial intelligence evolves, we may not see any reason to keep live animals in zoos anyways. All we really want to do is fool our senses into believing that we have seen a polar bear.

One day,  we may find ourselves asking the question  “Do we really need to have live animals anyway?”  After all, we have all their DNA and we could just conjure up a real one if we ever really need it right? Sort of like a modern day Noahs Ark – we keep their DNA in storage to protect the species , then use electronic proxies to remind people what the species looks and acts like. Meanwhile , we have assimulated them and if we do not need to consume them , then we will just keep them shelved till some time when we may need to reseed the earth or some other planet. I only wonder if by then, humans will have already been replaced with electronic proxies also.

Speculation has always been at the forefront of human story telling. Ever since we thought we figured out how mankind crawled out of the sludge and starting hunting for mammoths, we’ve been trying to retell the story. And if that doesn’t satisfy your yearning for enlightenment, we have  movies going even beyond our meager beginnings and foretelling the direction that evolution will continue in the future.  So here it is, the story of mankind from start to finish through the following five movies.

1. Walking with Cavemen (2003)

Walking with CaveMan

Here we see man at his earliest stage of life, discovering fire, learning how to use tools, inventing language, and perfecting hunting practices. It sets the pace as a good starting point for man. Here man’s challenges are documented as pre-evolutionary species of ancestors are cast aside until homosapiens emerge, conquering the world as the dominant species.  It is speculated in the film that our most prominent competitor was the Cro-Magnums and that they they were physically superior to Homo Sapiens.  The battle for supremacy however was won with brains, not brawn and eventually the Cro-Mangnums died off leaving behind a species that continues to use intelligence to tame the world around us.

 2. Citizen Kane (1941)

Citizen Kane was really about William Randolf Hearst

Thousands of years have passed and man has made much progress on the planet, but very little in the way of evolving physically. We seem to have evolved as much as we needed to adapt to life on this planet. So we  evolved the way we do things. Citizen Kane is great because it give a birds-eye view of what the modern world has become and takes place in a time when mankind is embracing media , and communications are becoming global, shrinking the world as we formerly knew it. Even more compelling is that  we see for the first time, the power of the media and the especially explosive power of media and money. The ability to manipulate world events with cameras sets the pace for a new society.  This important step in evolution is a prerequisite to the architecture that will allow those with enough money to rewrite history and influence the future of society.

3. Enemy of the state(1998)

Enemy of the State .. so real its scary!

In a world where surveillance cameras, information sharing, and satellite communications is normal and insignificant,  humans have become desensitized to big brother’s watchful eye. Given in to the idea that our safety requires no less, we are blind and blissful of how much of our world is being scrutinized under the watchful eye of the world’s computer data banks.  So volumes of personal data are gathered, and used in a variety of ways to extend the influence of those who access to the information.  Enemy of the State depicts a world that is exactly as it is today from a technological standpoint ( or at least it was in 1998). This is what makes this movie so scary and brilliant at the same time. The way that personal data, satellites, cameras and computers are used to profile, demonize, and politically assassinate anyone in its target is downright bone chilling. It highlights how easily a person can be tracked electronically,  shut out of financial assets,  lose credibility by use of  “out of context “video feeds, and basically leave you as a shut out , on the run from society in general . With the media spoon feeding us everything we want to believe and computers infallibly keeping track of everything we do, people are being reduced to pieces of information that can depicted anyway the media sees fit. With all of the world’s databases coming together and sharing data, all it takes is a few keystrokes to turn John Q. Public in to Jailbird Jimin the eyes of the public.

4. Minority Report

Think NATAL will be this cool?

The evolution of man continues as nuero drug experiements lead the ability to forsee  future events and an impresssive array of technology with which to prevent these future crimes from happening.  In this world , life is more cerebral, and experiences happen more in the mind than anything else. From drug use, to jail time, to sex orgies and fantasies – all of it happens in the minds of citizens under tightly controlled circumstances in a world were transparency is the norm.  This could be the first steps to a world where we have no use for our outer extremities, as we learn to experience more of life inside our own heads. Perhaps someday we will just give our minds over to the machines and let them take care of us…..which brings us to our last movie.

5. The Matrix

Daycare in the Matrix

Finally we have evolved to a higher level of existence. The machines, in performing their ultimate goal are taking care of our every need. The machines keep us alive and monitor our health, feed us with nutrients, dispose of any waste and even provide our mind a life program to keep us occupied. What more could one ask for from our future overlords? The matrix ask us to question whether or not we even exist or if we are simply living  out a program feed to our brains. Some philosophers ask “is this such a bad thing?”  I say yes, because if this is nothing but a program than I want to be able to change the channel when I want! In any case, this movie a prime example of how man supposes we could evolve  someday. In classic mankind style, we will fight it to the death before finally accepting it.