stevengharms

De scriptibus meis:

Content seduces us (good, ill, pornographic) while the delivery mechanism re-patterns our thinking process. That is we can’t think about idea acquisition, as moderns, without “book.” We can’t think of “a day” without a notion of a measured, external reality that is divided into 246060 measured by the rattle of a cesium atom

Prologue

McLuhan: “The content of a medium is ‘the juice piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’(Carr, 4).”

Consider: Maxim that “content is king” heard at SXSW and other conferences. We celebrate the content which has been “the same for every new informational medium going back at least to the books that came off Gutenberg’s press. Enthuniasts, with good reason, praise the torrent of new content…a ‘democratization’ of culture…[s]keptics, with equally good reason, condemn the crassness of the content…a ‘dumbing down’ of culture” (Carr,2).”

“The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears behind whatever flows through it..”

This is as “The Matrix:” a world pulled over our eyes.

Confer: “Snow Crash:” by patterning our mind by exposure to certain content we immunize, or throw the gates open to the raiding Greeks, the defenses and structures of our mind. Seduced by Sinon’s story, we miss the function of the content (i.e. that he is a reuse designed to allow a mental re-patterning).

Thought: What if, by all this distractibility-inducing content, the famed “man verusus machine” war has already been fought and lost by my side: capitalism (Zynga/Pincus, FB/Zuckerberg, Twitter/…) and the espoused love of content have allowed the virus in, and now it can’t get back out.

Chapter 1

“the Net seems to be … chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation(Carr, 6).”

“‘I have lost the ability to read a longish article on the web or in print‘(Carr, 7).”

Philosophy degree holder Joe O’Shea, Rhodes Scholar: “I don’t read books…I go to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly (Carr, 8).” Steven: This is absurd! College, esp. a philo. degree is not about getting the points ticked off in progression, it’s about learning to follow an intellectual thread. To know that Berkeley said X is worthless, to know that Berkley’s X was a reaction to Malabranche or Descartes and why is the point. What a waste of time, O’Shea. I suspect he’ll come to rue that being in print.

“I can’t get my [Literature!] students to read whole books anymore (Carr, 9)”

Chapter 2

Nietzsche acquired a Malling-Hansen typing ball, an early typewriter: “Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts’ (Carr, 19).”

Pop-data: The brain has high neuroplasticity, through all life. Hope for stroke victims, keep practicing and your brain can learn to route around damage. Don’t stop.

Chapter 3

As we go through…[the process of] intellectual maturation [in a topic], we are also acting out the entire history of [that topic]. Specifically, as a child moves from primitive mapmaking (“Square and Triangle house with me out front”) to abstracted designs, assuming technical competence, (blueprint of my house on a birds-eye-view map…) we trace the evolution of that concept’s “being needed” through history. Lascaux caves didn’t need abstracted maps to know where a kill zone was.

Tools come in 4 varieties: * Sense amplifying: binoculars * Body amplifying: forklift * Nature altering: reservoir * Mind amplifying: clock,books, Web

The clock and the map changed us to believe there was an a priori entity “time” or “geography” that nostris abitis exists without us. A clock teaches us that something else is marking out a reality external to us but that we participate in, but it is we ourselves who created the thing! Cf. A. Huxley Island who points out that the gods are our inventions that we move that who, in turn, move us.

Walter Ong: “Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect the word.”

Technology has an intellectual ethic that goes with it, rarely recognized by its creators (Carr, 45). Our intellectual ethic is defined by books (even now, although slipping). Starts with Plato in the Phaedrus extolling written over oral knowledge transmission. Unsurprising, he was rich and well-born.

Chapter 4

Books went from being the realm of the rich to the many. The intellectual ethic (Chapter 3) went “viral.”

“[we]…trained our brains to control and concentrate attention (Carr, 64)”

“The reader becomes the book” in “deep reading.”

Books, their mass production, re-patterned, or pre-patterned in the case of children, the assumption of books’ existence and the requisite ability to focus and hold a thread of argument or description across units of time. This patterning may not be happening anymore, a stronger pattern is coming.

Chapter 5

The internet is ubiquitous and more media (including print journals) are going ot it. Hunter S. Thompson is only possible in a “Rolling Stone” that needs more pages. TV is looking more like the net, only so that it doesn’t let itself go to obsolescence. Libraries are replacing books with laptop space.

Chapter 6

No, hypermedia / web is not an improvement to a book. The image of a book: imago libri.

Book reading may return to being the activity of the rich. Mass book reading was a blip thanks to cheap paper presses. Steven: Soon the plebs will be amused by twitter and other Idiocratic “ow my balls” amusements while the skill to read, the will so to do, will return to the wealth classes whence reading started pre-Gutenberg.

The plebs will not know that their addiction to blip-meia has marked them as lower-class more surely than an Eliza Doolittle faux pas.

Consider the irony of the “populist” movements. It’s not that the “Tea Party” members actually know the material better, instead they believe in blip-media icons who interpret the facts for them and give them signs to promulgate as if they had read the material. Cf. “The Onion: Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be”

“Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence (Carr 108).”

Chapter 7

Mezernich “[Internet tools’] HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES”

The brain /is not/ a hard drive. It requires gaps to process and take in information. You’re filling a bathtub with a thimble, in that gap to refill the thimble magic happens. Continued bombardment creates superficiality and fleetingness in what you’ve “learned.”

The promise of hypermedia / video everywhere viz. pedagogy has not been achieved. It’s not made schooling better / faster.

Multitasking is a lie.

Chapter 8

Google.

Search engines are not a replacement for learning. A linked up library of alexandria (google books) with convenient hyperlinks is not better than books or a library. All that noise and clicking, the medium of online display is not conducive to actual reflective, stored reasoning.

The old “it’s not the technology it’s who uses it” is false. This is the important note about mind-altering tools. They have strong neurological changes. Give a man a shovel, he will still become strong. Give a man a Web and he will only be able to learn and think with it on, all the time, with him.

Any wonder, then, that always on devices are becoming so…essential? London cabbies’ knowledge is fading, kids’ ability to read a map, thanks GPS.

Google as Taylorist utopia. Everything is measured, A/B validated. Everything is measured in efficacy to the point sought. They cannot provide the context for the integration of the idea.

Chapter 9

“As people grew accustomed to writing down their thoughts and reading the thoughts others had written down, they became less dependent on the contents of their own memory (Carr, 177).”

“Naomi Baron: …a gentleman’s commonplace book …served…vehicle for and chronicle of his intellectual development (Carr 180)”

Memorization, a side effect of reading, or an accelerated effect of work is important and should be taken seriously.

The Net is not as the calculator. A calculator saves work of one type of memory, while you exercise the other. The Net mixes the two thus you hurt one at the expense of the other. The Web attacks working memory the calculator does not.

DF Wallace: “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think (Carr 194-5).”

Chapter 10

“Our ability to meld with all manner of tools is one of the qualities that most distinguishes us as a species (Carr, 208).”

Weizenbaum: “The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the post-war period and beyond, it’s enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most ‘progressive’ elements of american government, business and industry made it a resource essential to society’s survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping.” That is, what is the rule of the world that requires computers to function? It cannot function without computers. Computers’ existence creates a life where they cannot be rejected.

McLuhan: our tools end up ‘numbing’ whatever part of the body they ‘amplify’. the fingers became numb thanks to industrial weakving.

Even as our technologies become extenions of ourselves, we become extensions of our technologies

TS Eliot: The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

Even knowing he talks to an ELIZA-bot, humans attribute minds where they are not.

Heidegger: “tide of technological revolution…so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man that the calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.” The “frenziedness of technology threatens to entrench itself everywhere.” We are welcoming the frenziedness into our souls (222)

Epilogue

Ironically, HAL, the AI’s meltdown and statement of fear, paranoia, is human. We are becoming the artificial. “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence”

1. Cultivate idleness. Each time you’re not doing anything try to enjoy it. Don’t open BookFace mobile on the iPhone. Don’t open Twitter mobile.
2. Manage your ingress points: don’t open the aggregator site and let its promise distract you
3. Work in discrete units of time during which you turn off the information drug sites: Facebook, Digg, Reddit. A tool that sets 40 minute work sessions per hour (See: Pomodoro Method) that also blocks your most distracting sites might exist
4. Backlog links into a text file out of your “to be viewed” tab list. Close the tab after you’ve copied the URL in. Delete the file in 6 months time. These were all updates you didn’t need, obviously, but that you let control you

Why are we so quick to bore, why are we so needful of new input? Why is the need for new information so recognizably similar to the need for a cigarette?

The conclusion that presents itself is unpleasant and simple. Our minds have changed to want more events of this type. “But how did I change my mind, I did no drug, I was not brainwashed.” Ah, but you were. You stood by, beguiled by the story of a lying Greek and didn’t realize that Troy was being sacked of its gold behind your back all the while you stood by, begging for more of the fabulist’s tale.

And humans, being gregarious normative creatures, are accepting that others are patterned this way, are patterning ourselves this way and are joining in the cabal to make the distracted society the norm. But I contend it’s neither making us better or more content.

The other day I was working at my my colleague S.’s desk and watched her face get twisted and contorted by phone calls, emails, IMs and desk visits. In fact watching her read her e-mail killed me because a pop-up popped up as she was in the email application to tell her that more email had arrived. Pair this with more and more IM update blinks and it was enough to make me angry at her for tolerating this. How do you ever feel caught up? How do you ever feel sane?

Where is there time for the quiet mind? And don’t you miss it?

Quo Vadimus?

Where are we going, where can we go? Are we caught in a recursive vice such that we’ll never be able to get out (like Postmodern discourse)?

Am I to delete my Twitter account, delete my Facebook account?

Am I to shut down my IM client and turn off my email program?

I don’t think the answer is an unequivocal “Yes,” but I believe the tools and the methods of interface need to be reevaluated, updated, and where necessary ignored. Certain metaphors (“email”, “feeds”, “push notification”) might need to be drowned so that we don’t drown. Just like “Metropolis’” Moloch Machine, we cannot make the survival of the system a higher good than our own healthy function.

I believe some innovators have adopted rules and heuristics for handling this situation. Consider how Richard Stallman (originator of emacs, one of the primary text editors of choice) “browses the web.”

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

“Slow in real-time…” this might be an important phrase.

Stallman is forcing the “social web” to map to his need of it, not vice versa. No doubt that since he engaged with the web through the portal of “e-mail” in his primitive mail reader (that he wrote) he reads web content not in the cursory ‘scan’ but in a thoughtful, considered fashion.

Also, Stallman clearly doesn’t “surf.” To get a link aggregator site (Facebook, Digg, Reddit), Stallman would have to send several email events to get the updates. As such, he simply can’t be as distracted as those of us who open up an aggregator page and explode out every length. Stallman is mastering a monkey-mind impulse to get more informational drug hits and is sipping a sherry unlike the majority of us who are guzzling dubious grade mental distraction like high schoolers at Señor Frog’s

Another data point is this image:

It strikes me that the difference between important and urgent is being defined and few people are working to do it. T

Conclusion

The net impression that I’m taking away from this book is that we’re a bunch of twitch-moded-next-flashing-light monkeys thanks to constant, ubiquitous, information teases. It’s the same thing that when tied to coins makes a slot machine a profit center. We must make ourselves (again) the masters of the tap. These thoughts were inspired by “The Shallows.” If you would like to explore these ideas further, you might find it a worthwhile read.

When last I wrote, I suggested that it’s not unreasonable to see the Internet as part of a conspiracy to reformat the human mind. I don’t believe it is part of a diabolical strategy, but its effect is pervasive and, I would suggest, most visible when examining one particular population: smokers.

My friend Bruce Williams tweeted:

The phone had replaced the cigarette in terms of many gestures

While this quote is certainly pithy and seemingly spot on, it misses what is actually happening. Historically when smokers left the building it was to disconnect from the work environment. In the lounge, turned smoking lounge, turned back alley behind the dumpster, smokers could congregate and “disconnect:” talk about the weather, talk about the cigarette, offer the new girl from accounting a light, and sometimes when no one else was out, watch the world go by.

But a phone, and especially a smart-phone, does not offer this catharsis, it does not push the clutch in on the gears of the same monkey-work one does at his desk. It offers the chance to get away from the flurry of the mentes novae, but in fact encourages you to operate in this same mode, but for your personal life.

Perhaps because I walk down San Francisco’s 3rd street in the business district I’m keenly aware of this sight: clutches of smokers smoking and with nicotine delivery device-free hand, punching into their smart phones ignoring the people immediately to their left and right. It is the height of the narcissism of our times: dancing with ourselves, talking with ourselves.

No longer is “going for a smoke” an escape, it’s an excuse to got an informational+nicotine dose. While this population displays its effects clearly, it is reasonable to conclude that other tribes and social subsets are also being changed as the hyperconnected mens nova becomes their default mode of thought.

Virality

Previously I wrote about the mens nova, the new mind, and how, for some it is being programmed and encouraged by our peers and our workplace. It would seem that the mens nova should be localized among certain work disciplines or economically advantageous countries and age groups.

But it is not. As the elder generation dies away, the population will come to be dominated by those who understand and take as granted the mens nova. Further, the older and less digitally entrenched are not immune. Parents will be seduced by text messages, smaller, more frequent, offering status insights on a faster basis. Grandparents will embrace the iMac and a lighter digital bombardment as their teachers, the young, slowly show them how to scale emotional payoff (pictures, video, Skype) in real-time.

Furthermore, markets will demand growth as they always do. Capitalism demands that new consumers be found: the old, the young, the blind, the poor. To convert eyes and clicks into revenue, interfaces will be made more simple, arguments will be made more simple, and complexity will diminish even as social norms and distraction alerts increase their presence.

Again, it is not just the new that will conform to the mens nova. Old media will also put on new personae to fit into the expectations of the mens nova patterned readership. CNN’s news site is now a pale simulacrum of a news site. Fox news’ site blares and blasts with the subtlety of UK’s “The Sun).” But that’s not surprising, they’re owned by the same corporation. Short, contextless atoms of information float in a sea of pictures and sixty-four point headings. This is the world of Internet news and it is dumb, dumb, dumb.

The virus has us already. Barring shortage in materials or energy, we have no choice but await the new mind’s complete infiltration and dominance. What sort of animal is being created? What sort of political being is this? If we can’t make it through a paragraph of an intelligently-written newspaper, how can we be a people of critical thought?

Conspiracy

It’s not unreasonable here to let your mind wander freely and start to come to scary conspiracy-theory grade conclusions. I believe it’s worth getting them on the table:

• The Man™ designed the Web as a Huxleyan weapon of mass distraction. We won’t rebel not because we don’t care, but because there’s so much more noise everywhere else
• The Man™ / Space aliens are patterning our brains (Snow Crash or Macroscope style) to receive an imprinted thought virus
• The Man™ and other plutocratic institutions designed the Internet to amuse plebes whilst they plan a separate tier of actual knowledge and wealth creation information network (Internet 2, or “books,” which will fly under the radar as tmz.com and @justinbieber absorb larger slices of the attention pie)

None of these, formerly the realm of science fiction are inconceivable. Perhaps the greatest contribution of “The Matrix” cycle was to suggest that such a thing was possible and we should be wary of, wait, what just happened on Twitter? Does even the far-fetched nulltopia of “The Matrix” even seem impossible anymore? Or does it just seem to be a higher definition experience than what we currently mediate?

To Be Continued…

While Carr’s book, as I outlined in my previous post seems to follow a neutral, logical character, the book is also intensely personal. Carr himself starts the narrative not as a dispassionate researcher asking whether the neuro-anatomical structures of the brain are changing due to prolonged Net exposure. Carr begins, in Chapter 1, with a gut-feeling: “Why can’t I pay attention like I used to?”

For me this was very telling because I’ve been afraid to admit to myself that my mind has been changing over these last few years and that I’m not entirely sure it has been for the better. Prior to college my mind, it seems to me, was more or less in the same state. It grew more mature, to be sure, as a function of time, but the process by which I thought seemed of a consistent form. Even my first two years in the work force didn’t seem to change my mind’s machinery much, but in the 2004-2007 range some changes took root. My mind started conforming to the mens nova. Not only did I obtain it, but I excelled at having it.

Two specific problems with this mind emerged that I see now. When I was living in SF, single, I realize I must have engaged many of my dates with this mind. When a lady might have been speaking to me, I could see where the thought was going and, I suspect, I betrayed that I knew the direction the discussion was going and tuned out until the end of the statement.

You see, I had taken to being content-oriented versus communications-oriented. Think about it, isn’t this the mode of your mind after a day at a business or role dominated by the mens nova?

To her great credit, my lovely girlfriend Lauren, has spent many, many hours trying to help me de-pattern this mind viz. interpersonal communication. Even as she worked to de-program these patterns I became and attained several times in 06-07 a modality of this mens nova called Twitch Mode that I wrote about in this very blog years ago.

Around the time I reached my peak efficacy at being a Twitchy machine, I started implementing changes in my work behavior. I was lucky I was able to do this. I started shutting down IM, I started queueing mail. However, even as I did that new mens nova- friendly sites entered my life: Facebook and Twitter gave swift informational reward for repeated visits. I got an iPhone, a beautiful device to make sure that your favorite distractor sites are never further than a swipe away.

Like most modern people I am more twitchy than I ought be, but I am less twitchy than your average 14 year-old. How I hope to retain a reserve of peace will be a topic for a future post.

However, I knew, and Lauren insisted that there was a calmer, more human, more intimate place whither to return. What if you never knew a world where the mens nova was, nova? This is precisely the situation of the youth of today. What some of us knew from the experience of “getting lost in a book,” or that the swamis knew as “relaxed contemplation,” or that yoga teachers know when executing uttitha trikonasana perfectly they will have never experienced and will not know to miss it!

For me, a day where I left in Twitch Mode with my heart pounding could be mollified with alcohol, a long weekend, or a trip kayaking. Like a weekend pill popper or a college freshman at the end of a bender I could sleep it off and get back to normal. Yet for for many of us it is getting harder and harder to get back to normal; for some of us normal has been razed and its fields salted by the armies of the new mind.

To be continued…

Introduction

I recently read The Shallows and found it greatly enlightening. I plan on doing a series of posts on the topic of this book. My first post will be a basic synopsis.

Synopsis

Nicholas Carr’s argument in “The Shallows” is beautiful in its simplicity.

1. The human brain exhibits a property called neuroplasticity that endures through all stages of life. Therefore the mind’s physical structures are always mutable
2. What we do, which tools we use to express thought, and how we think fosters or inhibits focus in our minds and alters the quality of the thoughts themselves.¹ This is not merely a style of thinking change, but an actual change in the neural structures, per 1.
3. This patterning occurs, largely, without our knowing it.² While “distracted” the re-wiring occurs. Chief distractors are:
   1. content
      1. “Content is King” ethos seen in design community at large
      2. Content is chiefly lurid, gossipy, or pornographic.
      3. Repeated draws to primally-stimulating content distracts from the new patterning occurring
   2. social reënforcement:
      
      1. “What you’re not on BookFace?”
      2. “Can you sign on to IM so I can ‘ping’ you the servername?”
   3. other cues that satisfy reptilian brain pleasure / warning centers (legacy routines designed for predator evasion)
      1. “ding” sound
      2. flashing lights
4. With the mind having been changed, this mens nova, it now “esteems” content that works well with the newly formatted apparatus and has a harder time working with content that doesn’t. A quine-like statement emerges: The distracted mind favors that which works well within the framework of a distracted mind. Optimization for distraction occurs at the expense of focus and concentration
5. The mens nova is ill-optimized for depth, consideration, argumentation of length or scientific research, per previous point. This is precisely the mind to which the Internet distractors and design optimize as ideal
6. Popular culture maintains a Whig history style praise of this new mind. It avers myths that current research calls to question:
   1. “The mens nova is optimized for multi-tasking.” When we multi-task we are lying to ourselves. We are drowning and not admitting it to ourselves. We are reading 19-26 words and believing we have read an entire article
   2. “The mens nova will find richness in content that will give students more depth / (Postmodern tenet) will allow students to see around the Anglo-Western-male hegemony:” The purported benefits of the “multi-tasked mind” or the “media-enhanced schoolroom” have not surfaced
7. Market forces encourage the continued production of distracted mind applications and mind-distracting endeavors.
   
   1. Making interfaces that don’t pander to the mens nova will be deemed “un-intuitive” or “poorly designed”
   2. Other media are suborning themselves into the Net format:
      1. books via Google Book
      2. FoxNews and the “crawl bar”
   3. All facts are coming to be taken as atoms, not as components of opera.
8. We must choose to be aware of these changes and not pretend that homo cassium³ is inherently superior to homo sapiens
9. In a world of homo cassium what will his weaknesses be? Has the dazzling light of “progress” actually been a regress?

My next post will be a reaction to the book and a response to the distilled argument presented here.

Footnotes

1. I love this notion of our tools being part of what forms how we see and that our tools cannot be other than the way such that they are usable to us. I think there’s an interesting symmetry between the anthropic principle and neuroplasticity
2. Re-patterning is not bad per se. While a young we were seduced by “story time” and “book reports” into patterning our brain to be book-friendly, or not
3. Man of the nets. There’s a fun ambiguity implying that he might be trapped by said nets not just be of the Nets.

I recently got a Cisco Flip camera. It’s awesome, but OSX has a major problem that it launches iPhoto (in addition to the Flip software) when I plug in the device to the USB port.

This means that two applications are busily indexing the contents of a USB device every time I want to use it.

To inhibit:

Plug device in → → Launch Image Capture → Select the device → Change the drop-down for “When device is connected” from iPhoto to do nothing → Be happy.

Back in 2005 Apple released the iPod shuffle. Realizing that they had just unearthed the biggest technological personal computing boom since Dell conquered East Anglia and realms beyond with Stephen, our hempen “Dude, you’re getting a dell” guy, they had a challenge: how can we get everyone to buy another one?

Dude, you should liquidate AAPL and return value to shareholders! — Michael Dell circa 1997

Do not question the wisdom of Stephen Paul Jobs’ secret emotion reader of populations (Asimov anyone?). In this time, Apple brought us The iPod Shuffle.

Yes, a USB stick with a button.

And yes, I bought one. It seemed the perfect step forward: don’t take that big-ass 60GB iPod to the gym, take just enough songs to rock you (like a hurricane) while on that elliptical.

I’ve had mine now for, I believe, 6 years. I took it out running yesterday and in a swinging arm / earphone cord contact incident, I snapped the USB stick iPod from my hip and it fell to the ground with a clatter. Being a USB stick well-designed consumer electronics device, it was OK, but the clip that I used to hold it to my waistband was done for.

Obviously the 3^rd party market has dried up for hip clips of this generation of shuffle. Was I going to actually going to buy a new shuffle to replace my holding clip?

Then I remembered that the iPod Shuffle came with a totally SWEET lanyard.

So now I run with my shuffle on lanyard, inside the shirt. Sure the USB stick gets a little moist, but I lack the cool (L) or the money (R) of these two guys to make up for the dorktacular spectacle.

NPR recently shared Erik Baard’s suggestion of why humans ought, and perhaps are morally obligated to, develop Artificial Intelligence.

Traditionally AI opinions are predictable. Either “bots run amok (possibly enslaving humanity, determining us a parasite, rendering all matter indistinct, or generically squashing our free will and giving us a life that we consider less human)” or “bots are our salvation: they will help us, we will become them, or they will optimize humanity’s place on Earth benevolently.”

Baard makes an interesting supposition, the ecological fate of the Earth is sealed: we will exhaust the resources on this planet in a finite measure of time. Or, perhaps, we will upset the balance of ecology such that we sterilize ourselves, poison our foodstores, or overengineer our crops to the point that their homogeneity makes them vulnerable to utter blight. Before that happens, something unique on Earth has arisen: the ability to create electronic systems capable of surviving inter-planetary travel.

On a planet with intelligent whales, birds, squid, silicon-based plants, the possibility of creating a single shard of etched silicon wafer is a total impossibility. It could be that in the Drake equation f_c is remarkably low.

Therefore to create a digital AI being that can carry the skill of intelligent machine construction (ça veut dire: itself) and human life might be humanity’s gift to the Universe itself.

Imagine this mechanical panspermia. As the Earth is a charred cinder held in the corona of a swollen Red Giant, and as an inter-galactic collision begins that will plunge Earth into the event horizon of a neighboring galaxy’s central black hole, a single robot harvests clay and ammonia, incubates RNA, and injects it into a small E. coli colony. It injects this primitive mixture of genetic soup into a mineral substructure as lakes of fresh water roil in a humid atmosphere. First the bacteria, then the protazoa, and finally that entitled creature rises again. And perhaps as he places a naïve fleshy hand to metal that endured the ravages of inter-planetary travel, the device will exit hibernation and say: “Mankind, how lovely it is to see you again.”

As The Hybrid says:

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."