Devolution

by Max Brooks

Hell, I was at a Menlo Park conference once where a guy showed us how he’d hacked his hand, literally. Attached electrodes to the skin above the muscles in his forearm to play the piano. He didn’t know how to play. Just typed in the commands, clicked “execute,” and shazam! “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And that was just the beginning. What about a full exo-suit that could stimulate the entire body? “Think of the possibilities.” That was what the guy kept saying. Disabled individuals. The elderly. “Think of the possibilities.” I could think of a few. I raised my hand and asked, “Isn’t it possible for someone to hack that suit once you put it on, force you to pick up your perfectly legal assault rifle, and walk down the street to the local preschool?” He looked like I’d just kicked over his sandcastle. He hadn’t wasted one neuron on that thought, because, in his mind, it was just that. A waste. All positivity all the time. Learn to fly, even if it’s in the Hindenburg. Move fast and break things.

A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on. —CORDELL HULL, secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The whole country rests on a system that sacrifices resilience for comfort.

They all want to live “in harmony with nature” before some of them realize, too late, that nature is anything but harmonious.