For #PhilanthropyFriday, I wish to challenge my friend, Patrick Cox, for his embracing of biocomputing in this blog:

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/tech/tech-digest/whats-next-part-1-the-rise-of-biocomputing

Simply put, the ‘guns don’t kill people’ argument is spurious because if you give people enhanced capabilities and decreased limits, they will destroy.  When our chakra’s misalign and the system decides that hope is lost, then emotional turmoil, rage, and impulsivity, mixed with insomnia and thought dysfunction create what we read about on the news.

This week, a distraught man shot a doctor in one of the Harvard Teaching hospitals because he blamed the doctor for his mother’s death.  Perhaps none of that makes any sense but his narrative somehow led to his actions. And it was not a very good thing – except to the killer.

When I negotiate traffic every day, I am reminded of the “Twilight Zone” episode where the boy can wish all his neighbors and relatives into the corn field and they live in terror of him as a result.  If we could kill people just by looking at them, the freeways would be pretty clear by about 5:15PM in my opinion.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/440799

Ask anyone what country is the most likely to use nuclear weapons of mass destruction.  The answer might come back Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, or Israel.  But in fact, we are the only nation has used nukes and it was, in the words of Anthony, the 6-yo monster from The Twilight Zone’s “It’s a Good Life (1961)”  “A real good thing”.

Our relationships with ourselves, our friends, families, colleagues, political groups, cities, states, nations, religions, ethnicities are entirely irrational, easily manipulated through fear and lies, and unstable.

So now we wish to add the ability, as in “Ender’s Game,” of mentally hacking and being hacked because we are constantly wired to the net?

There is no firewall or proxy that will ever protect us from ourselves because our consciousness is based on the emergent properties of trillions of cells and neuro-endocrine networks resonating along with god-knows-what.  We need LESS computational power with fewer connections until we can master two contradictory ideas:

1) There is no truth that is not arbitrary and subjective

2) Truth and ethics must be driven by consistency and largely independent of agenda

When mankind has evolved to the point where your anonymous murder of me for cutting you off in traffic is as much of a tragedy as you getting a paper cut, then we can talk about upgrading the powers of the human animal.