closer:
Projecting power and fighting wars with minimal risk to one's own soldiers, with high accuracy and and potentially less risk to civilians on the other side, is progress of a sort. But law enforcement at all levels, not to mention our adversaries, are also getting access to these tools. I'm deeply uncomfortable imagining Google as an arms dealer, where its unprecedented knowledge of our lives gets added to devices that in the wrong hands are enormous threats. A company that claims "don't be evil" as a slogan can't be a neutral supplier to anyone with enough cash, or with data to trade.Dan Gillmor/Guardian 19.Dec.13
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As with everything else that's happening on the big stage now, there's a vision behind it. Always a vision behind it. Hidden, unarticulated, but shaping every act and utterance.
Whose vision, where it has its origin, and especially what it has as the result of vision translated into act, the opening out from conception to birth to maturity, that's the key. And as always, the doubting, the reluctant, the burned and shy are shoved aside or left standing on the sidewalk while the sleek dark vehicles accelerate silently away.
I see a worm inside a mechanical suit of armor, a cpu of inert organic sentience directing the implacable, with no connection to the gone world but formulaic nutrition, the old forms of biological splendor consumed to feed its mechanical necessities until it's a have-to, no longer just possible, no longer a bad choice, now the only choice.
The worm must live this way because it has no protection without it, no way to feed itself without it, no means without it to any other end but futility.
Just as the drones make cowardice viable, and the bitterness of cowardice acceptable, indiscriminately powering the weakest with just enough manual strength to pull those virtual triggers, the long run promise is compensatory not elevation, not extension of the good toward the better, not even transcendence from the neutral flatline of everyday humanity, but up from the sunken margins of failure. Revenge against nature.
The coward and the cripple with equal status to anyone who ever lived, handicaps defects incompleteness overcome to become prosthetic superior strength, because of possession of the machine interface as it grows toward symbiosis.
The worm hungers toward the stars, and it must make human essence its own, replacing the genuine, indefinable human, assuming the center, the reason for collective existence, as long as it requires moral governance to sustain its systemic needs.
Soon enough, in that vision, moral governance will be redundant, and all values will be the worm's survival only.
