In The Name of Motherboard, Microchip, and Holy Internet. Amen.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the idea of progress and efficiency are held in such high regard, that following and practicing of these ideas becomes the sole reason of living; a religion, even. The citizens of the “Brave New World” have completely given up the idea of a “self” and surrendered all individual desires for the good of the entire population; all in the name of productivity. They toil at the machines that create their society. They are basically controlled by them. Their society has become what Neil Postman describes as a “technopoly” in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. A technopoly being a society that lives to serve the technology that it has created.

As we progress in our technological discoveries, Brave New World starts looking less like science fiction and more like an instruction manual. We live in a “technocracy,” and “the citizens of a technocracy [know] that science and technology [do] not provide philosophies by which to live” (Postman 47). How long though can we expect to live within this technocracy? How long will it be until we serve our machines like slaves such as the citizens in Brave New World? As Postman states, “technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlines in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invincible and therefore irrelevant (Postman 48).  As we continue to progress, commonly performed activities of the past have become obsolete with the furthering of technology. We no longer write letters or essays with a pen and paper. It is no longer necessary to go to a library for research. With the exponential creation of technology, we are also rushing into a world where the motherboard has become our God.

The Singularity: The Exponential Race From Our Humanity

As I imagine my world and what it will be like in say, thirty or forty years, I once envisioned it simply looking a lot like how it does now—no exponential changes of any sort. However, I’ve learned that that future not only might be changing exponentially, but it might soon become something that is stranger than science-fiction.

As it turns out, according to Raymond Kurzweil and Gordon Moore as stated in the article “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal”, the progression and advancement of technology is exponential. According to Moore’s law, “the microchip doubles about every two years” (Grossman). One certainly doesn’t have to stretch their imagination too far to realize that technology is advancing quickly, and as technology advances, the quicker it picks up speed. What is a stretch though, is just beginning to try to put those facts into what Kurzweil considers a logical and realistic perspective. In his perspective, the progression of technology is so exponential that in just a few decades, artificial intelligence will rule over human thought, man will literally merge with machine, and that death will no longer be imminent.

This view, (“The Singularity” as it’s called), sounds interesting, perhaps even exciting to some. Becoming immortal? If one could never die, one’s problems would dwindle until they completely disappear. Kurzweil states that “we'll be able to transfer our minds to sturdier vessels such as computers and robots” (Grossman).

When we gain the ability to do that though, we lose our humanity. We’re no longer functioning as mind and body. By trapping ourselves inside machinery, we’ve eliminated our species. When we have finally created a transcendent metal demi-god from microchips and artificial intelligence, we’re putting ourselves at risk of being wiped out entirely. We’re creating a predator.

In addition to that though, by supposedly uploading our thinking mind into a motherboard, have we successfully uploaded our consciousness? Our emotion? Sure, with artificial intelligence, a machine could, in theory, feel sad or happy, but could it dwell on it? Could it write poetry on it? Act impulsively because of it? Be ashamed of it? Would we still think? Or would it just be ones and zeros in a hard drive? How could we ever know?

But death is what all life leads up to; it’s what makes us make the decision to shape our lives. Right down to it, it’s the soul reason man chooses to create art, produce variety, ponder philosophically. Once we eliminate death, we’ve eliminated beauty.

Rhetorical Critique

Rhetorical critique on  Iulia O. Basu's "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Tiger's Bride": To Be or Not To Be a Beast?.

In this essay, Basu tries to convey the nature of men and women and their effect on each other in a relationship. Basu uses Madame de Beaumont's Beauty and the Beast and Angela Carter's The Tiger's Bride as a lens to describe how wildness and civility take part in society’s typical gender roles. The main point that Basu is trying to convey is that while the “Beauty” in Beauty and the Beast is a civilized female who later converts the “Beast” into a real, human gentleman, the opposite is true in The Tiger’s Wife. In The Tiger’s Wife, it is actually the female Beauty who plays into the male Beast’s suppressed wildness and amplifies it with her devilish actions, and later, she herself becomes a beast. Basu’s thesis though, is quite controversial—relying heavily on assumed sexual undertones in Beauty and the Beast.

 Basu uses quotes from both novels in order to convey her point. The evidence she uses is very important to her point, because without the concrete text, her assumptions on the text would seem wild and outlandish. However, with carefully placed quotes, her argument becomes more valid.

Basu’s essay is structured in a typical manner.She begins with an introduction that introduces the two pieces that she analyzing and effectively states her thesis. She starts her introduction by first stating how Beauty and the Beast and The Tiger’s Bride illustrate the nature between men and women then she throws in a few examples of how civility and beastliness exist in both genders in the story, and then finally rounds it off with her thesis. Basu then takes the time to write out five body paragraphs that focus on the relationship between Madame de Beaumont’s characters and how they grow and change throughout the novel. She then goes on to focus on Angela Carter’s characters in the form of two body paragraphs—analyzing them in the same way she did Beaumont’s characters. She then reflects on the final transformations of all characters in her concluding paragraph. She effectively compares and contrasts the final ironic fate of the characters in both novels, and effectively shows us how it supports her thesis.

Overall, her transitions work well, but she seems to have to gather more evidence and make more assumptions for Beauty and the Beast to prove her point than she does The Tiger’s Wife which makes the piece feel slightly out of balance.

One major criticism with Basu’s piece is that her use terminology, although formal, is lacking in variety. She constantly uses the same fluffy words over and over which really begins to take away from her argument when it becomes apparent that she does not seem to know how to articulate her point in with more than one particular word.

Basu tries to establish herself as a credible source, and for the most part, she does so effectively. She obviously knows both texts very well and effectively pulls evidence from both texts to prove her point. However, some assumptions she makes are quite hard to wrap one’s mind around and offers very little reason as to why the audience should buy into the claims she makes.