Neurotransmitter highs

Brian D. Hardy

Kids getting high by eating a human brain...Okay, okay, so it seems a little far fetched. Sta-Hi seems almost to be a character out of the movie Kids. What about a world where all the elderly live in Florida and get weekly food drops? Or underground laboratories for the mass growing of organs? Through the technologies being developed right now in the field of Bio-Medical engineering, organ growing is right around the corner. The question of the ethics of such a practice remains to be examined. The recent cloning of a a headless frog in London raises serious issues for humans. Could headless humans be grown and then simply be used for organs, for spare parts? This follows behind an issue that we have been encountering throughout the semester. Technology certainly seems to be the gateway through which we can achieve immortality. But as we have seen in Software--Cobb Anderson, who is going to be "rebuilt from the ground up", living forever can really stink. Cobb Anderson is rebuilt in just the same manner that a car would be overhauled. It is our quest to be more like machine that is certainly going to afford us infinitely many opportunities in the future, yet how close we get can be immensely dangerous. Like the bobber-bots, who revolted against the humans, and even like Terminator, there will be a point in the future where artificial intelligence will surpass standard, conventional, human intelligence.

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[To other discussions of Rudy Rucker's - Ware trilogy (Software, Wetware, and Freeware) by members of English 111, Cyberspace and Critical Theory, Spring 1998.]

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