Wearable computing in the form of smartwatches may be the next big extension of man (and woman). Here’s The Los Angeles Times on what Apple appears to be up to:
[Smartwatch owners may soon be able to] read emails, Facebook notifications or caller ID by simply glancing down at their wrists.
The smartwatch, connected wirelessly to the iPhone, would tap the power of the voice assistant Siri to control music, dictate messages or get directions. Forget the wallet? Just swipe the watch near a scanner to make a payment. And as you jog home later, the kinetic energy of your movement would keep the battery charged while the iWatch measures your heart rate and the distance covered.
I suppose it will also double as a cock ring for men, applying real time data on blood engorgement while you get it on.
As humans acquire ever more abilities akin to magic, what’s left for God to do for us? Will such technology spell the decline of religion over time? O will it simply ramp up people’s sense of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and fear so that religion becomes more appealing?
I suspect it’s the former. Over the next century, religion is on the water-slide downward. People won’t be happier, but they’ll be less religious. Most people, as they come of age and move from childhood innocence to experience in the 21st century, will realize that there is no one who can provide their lives with sure meaning, and in seeking for some adequate substitute for religious certainty, they are likely to have an experience pretty much like that described by Wallace Stevens in his “Of Modern Poetry” (1942):
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
Sounds like the Republican Party is having a similar problem right now. Time to be creative.
Prometheus Unbound 