Article of Today’s Topic: Virtual is No Refuge from the Real by James Howard Kunstler (Elm Street Writers Group)

At first it seems as though Kunstler is only talking about the mundane topic – the topic of how America is bad and is going down hill and no one is doing anything constructive about it. Referring to the suburban living and aritifical socializing via chat rooms and virtual reality games, he says this artificial/virtual oriented lifestyle has got to stop before humans go out of business.

To add to the article’s topic, we can easily imagine how we could go out of business as the result of our increasingly technology-dependent living style – or our dependencies in the virtual world. People like David Levy (British AI researcher and the author of Love and Sex with Robots) have no problem picturing this for us. He argues that some people are actually more comfortable with an artificial being rather than interacting with real humans. Such people turn to games such as Second Life and others, which offer a virtual society/world for them. For these people who are so uncomfortable or unsuccessful with real human beings, especially in finding partners, David Levy suggests ‘wait until the future comes, and you’ll probably be able to marry a robot.’

I believe that such marriage would be the most virtual, or non-real of them all. If your husband robot gives you a hard time, then you could just turn him off and enjoy your peace. Or even better, you might as well program him not to annoy you the same way again.

We must realize that encouraging the robot industry by these imaginations that promote virtual/artifical life style will probably cost us the presence of reality. As many famous economists say, there’s no such thing as free lunch. One way or another, someone has got to pay the price – and I think we all realize that this is absolutely true. So far, we might have seen only the fraction of the price we have to pay for our reckless use of technology via the environmental issues.

We are already headed towards a world without dwelling and a world of constant shift and upgrades – the world Martin Heidegger advised us to avoid since a few decades ago

We must also realize that all words of wisdom regarding the increased “technology dependent living style” have been telling us that the definitions for utopia and convenience (or whatever the ads tell you the benefits of the technology is) are two completely different things and that we should not blurr these definitions.

Convenience and the benefit of not having to put much effort in getting a desired end product only gives us the illusion of bringing a utopia. I think this is an important topic we should all think about. How have these highly technological devices made my life more utopian? Remember, the 400 series highways we have in Ontario are a very close replica of what people have imagined as the utopian lifestyle in the 40′s.