A future shock as a way to think about tomorrow

Andrey S. Kon­dau­rov
Lugan­sk State Acad­e­my of Cul­ture and Arts named after M. Matusovsky

A future shock as a way to think about tomor­row

Abstract. This paper is a response to the arti­cle “The Phi­los­o­phy of the ‘Black Mir­ror’: A rev­o­lu­tion in the minds up and down…”. Agree­ing with the con­di­tions and trends in the devel­op­ment of mod­ern sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy and civ­i­liza­tion described in this arti­cle, the author, how­ev­er, approach­es these issues from a dif­fer­ent point of view. He agrees that con­tem­po­rary cul­ture is a reflec­tion of the desired and expect­ed future, and points to the inalien­abil­i­ty of mod­ern tech­nolo­gies that rep­re­sent the “black box” for the user. How­ev­er, since it is pos­si­ble for tech­nol­o­gy to evolve much fur-ther, it might reach the lev­el of human­i­ty and over­come it. In such a case, humans would either find them­selves in games and cre­ativ­i­ty or appear doomed to extinc­tion. The author shows that in such cir­cum­stances, the devel­op­ment of vir­tu­al real­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy and the trans­fer of human con­scious­ness to exter­nal media might be a most ben­e­fi­cial way for the civ­i­liza­tion to devel­op. In a sit­u­a­tion when the elim­i­na­tion of the phys­i­cal body opens up much more oppor­tu­ni­ties for a per­son than they might have in the real world, death (in its phys­i­o­log­i­cal sense) becomes more a “lib­er­a­tion of the spir­it” and a begin­ning of a new “life” rather than pro­vokes fears as an insol­u­ble prob­lem. How­ev­er, such tech­nolo­gies and their con­se­quences need a thor­ough philo­soph­i­cal analy­sis, the respon­si­bil­i­ty for which is still on human shoul­ders.

Key­words:vir­tu­al real­i­ty, tech­nol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy of tech­nol­o­gy, post-apoc­a­lypse, philo­soph­i­cal anthro­pol­o­gy

DOI: 10.5840/dspl2019213

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