EXCERPT -- The Worker, Alone!

DEUS ex MACHINA

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 27, 2015

As disturbing as the radicalism of the 1970s were in terms of abandoning our psychosexual mores, four decades later with the advent of the personal computer, we have essentially forsaken our conscious self and undergone an evolutionary change.

Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities.  Not least of which is anyone with an iPhone knows it has speech, reducing the boundaries between people and machines.  

Few are aware of this intrusion on intimacy, being constantly on and interacting with machines, indeed, interacting with each other by means of machines and their programs: i.e., computers, smartphones, social media platforms, and dating apps. 

We are endanger of losing our humanity of becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.  Small wonder there are increasing anxieties and troubles in relationships between people.     

So many of us are “in love” with our devices, unable to put them down during dinner, in a college lecture class, during a church sermon or television drama, glued to the screens of all sizes and shapes, all colors and embroidery, endlessly distracted by electronic pings, vibrations, and buzzers. 

This is the latest incarnation of a people who no longer find solace in God or the Christian myth.  Machines are no longer interchangeable, but it is people who have been for it is the machine now that has all the gravitas and personality.  It is the machine that has become our god.

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