Monday, November 8, 2010

Computers Cause Wars

The proof? According to wired.com, they've already begun pitting old rivals against one-another like pawns in their chess game of world domination:

An embarrassing error on Google Maps has been blamed for Nicaragua’s accidental invasion of Costa Rica. Last week, Nicaraguan troops crossed the border, took down a Costa Rican flag and defiantly raised their own flag on Costa Rican turf.

But the troops’ commander, Eden Pastora, told a Costa Rican newspaper, La Nacion, that his invasion was not his fault, because Google Maps mistakenly said the territory belonged to Nicaragua. Government officials in Nicaragua have also blamed a “bug in Google” for the error.

Google admitted fault in the matter, but I'm convinced they've already been co-opted by the machines as a cover-up for the greater robotic uprising on the horizon, as admitted by two computer propaganda artists in the following recently leaked video:



Regardless, perhaps its finally time for educators to admit that training in technology and teaching children to utilize search engines is no substitute for embodied, hands-on learning - the kind that includes, for example, actually reading books, doing real research, following maps, and visiting communities before claiming sovereignty over them. Otherwise, the reality represented in (and by) this video could become our inevitability. (For an actual assessment of the Internet's invasion of our neuro-regions, check out Nicholas Carr's fascinating book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains - that is, if you can still read, or if Canada has not yet mistakenly invaded your town).

I raise these warnings by way of blogging about Andrew Sullivan's blogging about yet another blog, so perhaps my own technology-dependence undermines my own argument - or, perhaps its proof that the revolution has already begun...

1 comment:

  1. Flight of the Concords are amazing(yet one more thing Netflix has to offer on their watch instantly feature)....but their line, "can we talk to the humans and work together now?" "no, because they are dead" has more meaning when you relate it to how we tend to find out information today (as you said) in your post. We have lost so much of the human connection we once had.

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