I’ve been thinking about the nature of society a bit. I think it’s mostly fake.
A day in my life may include making up my own Facebook games. Ones like, “What classic Star Trek character are you?” I’m Spock/Scotty. Or, “Which famous actress are you?” I’m Audrey Hepburn.
Yesterday I played “What famous mathematician am I?”
Let’s see, Kurt Gödel did math in bed staring at the ceiling. Check. Gödel was paranoid and probably died of starvation fearing his food was poisoned. Am I that paranoid? Hmm, moving on.
John Nash, famous from the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” sort of went off a little there in the middle of his life. It so happens I sort of went off a little in the middle. But he sort of came back. Have I, really?
Leonhard Euler, famous for relating the number π and the number e (which is named after him), worked with children running all over the place. Just the thought of trying to think clearly while being overrun by rugrats puts my nerves into tangles. He’s out.
Archimedes shouted “Eureka!” and ran through the streets naked. I would never do either. He invented war machines. I ticked off a university by refusing to even apply for a military grant, much less help design better torpedoes. Finally, a Roman soldier supposedly killed Archy after the old man told the soldier not to mess up his sand circles. I would never tell a man waving a sword around, “Don’t mess up my sand circles.” I would say, “Would you care for a beer? By the way, feel free to walk all over my sand circles.”
Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, presents an interesting case. We have an amazing number of things in common. He was a mathematical child prodigy. I was a mathematical child. He has liked some of the same kinds of math I have liked. He’s been opinionated and demonstrated anger management issues. But I just can’t match his obsession for wood and woody places, or his over-the-top Walden Pond-ish tendencies.
At the end of the day, I decided that the mathematician I’m most like is Steve. You’ve probably never heard of Steve. But one nice thing about playing the game “What famous mathematician are you?’ by yourself is no one else has to know the guy you consider famous.
All that happened yesterday, and this morning I sat down to read that Elon Musk — my favorite technological entrepreneur, of Tesla and SpaceX — now wants to put a big effort into machine-enhanced voluntary mental telepathy. Musk wants to make it possible for people to communicate what goes on in their heads directly without intervening language. He wants to set it up commercially, so people can network their brains together over the internet.
Imagine that everything I said above, all that musing about what mathematician I should be, got transmitted over the brain-web, language-free, into the brain receptors of someone halfway around the world who doesn’t know a word of English, and they followed along with their synapses and ganglia right up to the end when they found out the answer was “Steve.”
Would I be sent bombs in the snail-mail? Would men with swords show up at my door to trample my sand circles?
Or would the retaliation take the form of a matching barrage of twisted thought taking a day and leading to some idea that the transmitter is most like “Achmed,” or “Boris”?
Look at all the ways the ordinary internet has changed the world. Without internet social media, imagine how hard it would have been to explain, “Let’s share ceiling cat jokes?” When I hear about ventures in new technology, I always wonder what unexpected changes in society they may bring about.
Imagine you could get out of your bubble and directly communicate with people around the world completely different from you, such as, for example, people who are into the ceiling dog, or the ceiling kangaroo? Would you do it?
Or would you break off into little groups, where you wouldn’t need to hear about any Steves, Achmeds or Borises you don’t already know?
If you can’t look into the eyes of people you see on the street, why would you want to look into the minds of people around the world?
Dr. Wes Browning is a one time a math professor and three times homeless. He has been involved with Real Change since he supplied the art for the first cover in November of 1994. This is his regular humor column, Adventures in Irony.