Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Birds and those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines


Loreen Eisley, author of "The Bird and The Machines," represents the opinion that life is more important than machines. Real people, with real lives and real experiences, are doing great things, and we should not disregard that for some "machine," even if it can do things faster. Even people are machines to some degree- full of pulleys and joints. What's the difference?

Eisley points out that power can be found in anything, and their place in society is dependent upon the amount of power and worth we as humans give it. Since we have given digital technology a high position, it has that position- we all should recognize the human's potential as a sort of "judge."

This makes sense to me, particularly with one of his points: "I learned...that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe. The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm" (Eisley 603). In other words, we have created the cosmopolitan ideal of "hurrying" to catch a plane, to meet up with friends, or to get to a recital on time. Andy the Squirrel didn't say, "You have to have deadlines, because otherwise nothing will get done."

That's on us.

And we have to understand that a machine cannot take responsibility for something. It doesn't have ideas, or dreams, or even knowledge.

The designer of that machine has dreams.

As soon as we start to forget that, we forget who we are, and what we were meant to do.

And once that's gone, we're living a meaningless existence.

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