O. Razor <o_razor@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I just saw a commercial for a television program entitled "Brave New
World."
> It will air Thursday, August 5th at 10 PM Pacific / 9 PM Central (I
don't
> know what this means for the rest of you), on CBS. During the commercial
an
> interviewee says to an interviewer, "You'd rather be dead than alive in a
> stainless-steel mind?" Though this was the extent of the commercial, it
> sounded Transhuman enough that the program itself probably deserves some
> attention.
I saw the first in a series of 8 of these last week. It was about the quirky human fascination with time-saving devices. Like how orange juice went from being packaged in a half gallon paper container with the tear open side to a container with a twist off cap on the side to a container with a pull-tab opener. Another example was how manufacturers of cd players were now including a feature where one can reduce the usual 3 seconds between songs down to 1 second. Why wait? You have better things to do with your time! I'm not so sure we're as fascinated with saving time as we are manipulated by corporate product managers who feed on our obvious desire for "new and improved" products. Ted Koppel made a paternal-like appearance at the end of the show and voiced his opinion that we are caught in a technological tyranny.
The show was produced in a somewhat more entertaining fashion than other versions of Primetime, but was seriously lame in parts. Still, they intend on devoting some of their future shows to superstring theory, the liklihood of human extinction, and some other topics that sounded fairly interesting.
Cheers,
Scott