Monday, August 29, 2005

Cyborgs: there a'comin.

While watching the news last night, a piece came up on how the computer system used in the Sci-Fi Tom Cruise film, "Minority Report" was now a reality. It really solidfies what Jo and Luke have been saying in lectures about the increasing possibilities of merging humans with technology. Summarily, you put gloves on which transmit the movements you make with your hands to the screen in front of you. So far it is being used in military type situations in the US (suprise suprise), to enhance maps and other kinds of surveillance. As the user, you can pretty much point at the block of apartments you want to see closer and just keep magnifying in, while discarding any of the other inforamtion contained in the same piece of data. In my severely technologically incapable mind, I find it akin to those new PS2 games that you have to dodge balls and things using the gloves and they are trying to promote it as some kind of exercise regime. Anyway, I think that it is interesting that it is no longer enough that we interact with such interfaces using a mouse or console/joystick, we now seem to need a more personalised, hands on approach to how we use technology. So what is our fasination with getting closer and closer amalgamated to technology so much so that becomes a part of the human body? And does the problem of human err become bigger when we try to fuse the two together? I mean in terms of mapping out war territory, are we lessening the degree of accuracy we can obtain due to the overwhelming desire to put the human rather than mechanical stamp on it?

Char*

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