How to Become Part of the Machine

Some of the mind-intensive activities or experiments outlined in this recent New York Times article have been selected below:

"Go to Google Image Labeler (images.google.com/imagelabeler) and you are randomly matched with another bored Web surfer — in Korea, maybe, or Omaha — who has agreed to play a game. Google shows you both a series of pictures peeled from the Web — the sun setting over the ocean or a comet streaking through space — and you earn points by typing as many descriptive words as you can. The results are stored and analyzed, and through this human-machine symbiosis, Google’s image-searching algorithms are incrementally refined. . . .

Now a site run by Amazon.com, the Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/), asks you to lend your brain. Named for an 18th-century chess-playing automaton that turned out to have a human hidden inside, the Mechanical Turk offers volunteers a chance to search for the missing aviator Steve Fossett by examining satellite photos. Or you can earn a few pennies at a time by performing other chores that flummox computers: categorizing Web sites (“sexually explicit, “arts and entertainment,” “automotive”), identifying objects in video frames, summarizing or paraphrasing snippets of text, transcribing audio recordings — specialties at which neural algorithms excel. . . .

How do you categorize Wikipedia, a constantly buzzing mechanism with replaceable human parts? Submit an article or change one and a swarm of warm- and sometimes hot-blooded proofreading routines go to work making corrections and corrections to the corrections."

Click on the title of this post to read the entire article. (Free Registration may be required at New York Times site.)

Halographic Prayers Underground

Alternate title: World Wide Web 2050

In a special holographic circular room your entire body is connected by wireless electrodes to the supercomputer that colors your seemingly endless room by purposely preventing you from ever hitting any of the walls.

You wear no goggles. There is nothing but yourself and the almost perfect illusion that you are in bright sunshine or in the mountains of the distant past, as you meet and experience people and locations that would have been unthinkable 43 years ago.

The clothes you try on are sent to your home. The furniture you sit on has been shipped and will arrive there by morning, or sooner, for you to enjoy. The virtual people you meet will seem to know you perfectly if ever you meet them in the flesh.

As you sit in the holographic church, or temple, and worship the real God in a real heaven, you wonder how anyone ever risked the safety and the variety that the holographic web now affords you. You find it preposterous that humanity once lived in the precarious world before the free nations of the world had to go into hiding to avoid the nonstop bombing of the cities above ground.

Why are We Here? A Different Approach

God forbid that the following should ever happen. It almost happened when the fate of mankind was in the balance at Gethsemane. There really was a risk that something could have gone wrong. Otherwise Christ and God really didn't risk anything by sending Jesus Christ to die for humanity at infinite risk to himself and the Godhead.

The following is not meant to disrespect God or those of us who believe in Him. It is simply one man's attempt to answer the age old question: Why are we here? Of course, it is an approach for a believer in God that is admittedly peculiar and to some, problematic.

Again, what if, and this is a really big what if--by some terrible disaster, something happened to God? We, his heirs, spiritual and ethical, would still be in the universe to continue his vision for the universe, or the multiverse, or whatever kind of Meta-Space continuum exists beyond the parameters of our known universe. The laws of nature that God put into place would still continue to operate in the same way that a self-repairing mechanical device continues to exist as long as it is able to find newer sources of energy for itself to continue its intended function.

That might explain why there are so many of us on planet earth. We are God's insurance should anything ever happen to him. We really are the children of God. Why else create us and so many of us? Not that it will ever happen, but even we with our imperfect knowledge make plans for our children and, some of us, for our children's children. We are making those plans, ultimately, for us. So that our lives were not lived in vain. So that our descendants carry on our genes, our vision, our plans. At least that is the ideal.

With this remote and unlikely possibility in mind, humanity should make as many "what if" plans as possible. What if the asteroids that caused mass extinctions every 26 million years, wiped us out as well? What if some self-destructive principle our movement or ism alive in the world today would eventually wreak as much destruction on humanity as would that asteroid destroyer? What if some unknown but truly virulent virus were to develop in decades or centuries from now and wipe out most, or all of humanity?

All the beauty that God created, all his progeny, all his plans for us would end with these cataclysms. Every effort that can be made to protect present and future life should be made. Every resource that is now wasted should be better employed towards centuries-encompassing goals. What an utter tragedy if because of lack of vision or planning on the part of humanity, God's humanity, all the beauty and wonder and excellence that he created, is one day wiped out, with no new seed to make it grow again?

In more ways that we can imagine, not only do we live through God, but God lives through us, as well. May God and humanity continue this symbiotic relationship endlessly.

Cybernetic Reproduction

Neo-flesh covered cybernetic entities produce miniature versions of themselves that grow over a 21 year period into adult versions. Sex is for both personal fulfillment and procreation.

Each world is encased in orbs of neo-metal which in turn are enclosed within a larger orb. In effect, the larger orb is the known universe.

Some theorize that other orbs exist outside their universe containing worlds that exist as well as those in their known universe.

In an accidental time travel incident, archeologists from the known universe travel through a gateway out of their universe and into another universe or universes and make a startling discovery. They find a skeleton of an entity like themselves, but it is not made of neo-bone, but rather of a nonmetalic substance unknown to entitykind. The substance is named anti-bone. The records show that this "entity" was covered in anti-flesh and existed millions or billions of years before the arrival of entitykind. Some wonder if perhaps this accidental revelation was not so accidental after all. The original anti-entity could have made the time travel possible so that entitykind could learn the source of their being and world. Some then wondered how the anti-entity came to be and if there were others like it. Others insisted the discovery be kept secret as to not undermine society's smooth functioning.

The return trip was made impossible, but the discoverers were able to continue their existence, apparently forever, in the newly discovered universe where they lived a new existence without any further contact with their past universe. Perhaps they themselves would someday design a world within their world and cause a time traveler from its distant future to find their neo-bone remains.