Technology Department
These are the Techies of the Shadow Investigation Unit. Machines are their servants, and the local electronics dealer is their church. They believe in the progress of civilization through the perfection of technology. They are not ones to live off the land, acquiring skills necessary for an unlikely apocalypse. They've had their heads in machines since the moment they constructed their first radio-controlled vehicle. Since then, it has been about making things go faster, fly higher, be tougher, or act smarter. People and other biological bags of water and carbon are unreliable instruments at best. They never speak the truth and are prone to failure even with regular maintenance. Machines never lie, they never cheat, and if properly cared for, will never betray you or die unexpectedly. With only a few basic modifications or tweaks, these Techies can even push a machine to be better than what it was designed for, whether it be a robot, a car, or even a gun.
Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.-Alfred North Whitehead
Structure
Culture
The power of the human species is considerable over the non-human world. This is mainly because our intelligence has consistently invented and deployed tools and technology which means we have come to dominate the earth. Our tools mean we are not a simple species but always function as a hybrid species – part human and part technology – in a constantly changing mix of human and non-human components. Without our tools, we cannot be human.
Our essential hybridity with other animal, plant and machine life is now in the emergent stages of a giant leap towards new forms of power which we cannot envision. New applications of biotech, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) mean that our hybrid humanity is about to expand exponentially in a way that is already changing what it means to be human.
Technology will not just change us where we are but also change where we can be. Humanity will be enhanced in time and space but also relocated across time and space. This time-space compression and its resulting context collapse which began with radio and television is an ever-increasing feature of being human. Some of our grandchildren will probably be talking and listening simultaneously in a hundred different places at once in embodied replicas as holograms or humanoid drones. They will probably be fluent in all languages, move through space much faster than us and live forever on earth and in space because of biological and AI enhancements. Our machines will develop new levels of autonomy which, although created by humans, are inevitably adapted by machine learning into new forms of non-human and non-animal life.
This all means that the power of humanity as a species is about to increase dramatically because of a revolution in human-machine interaction which will see new forms of hybridity beyond our current imagining. As we explore the frontiers of our technology we also explore what it means to be human.
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.-R. Buckminster Fuller
Public Agenda
Creating the tools to get things done.
Without our tools, we cannot be human.
Alternative Names
Techies
Demonym
Tech
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