robots = skynet

I recently stumbled upon pictures and videos of some fairly frightening robots that have been created in the past few years...

1. The mesmerizing yet scary dancers
   
2. The violin playing robot with the freaky double jointed wrist
   
3. The 'Big Dog' is one of the more frightening (if you haven't seen the youtube video...it's a frightening 'must see' {Also, you must see the parody video as well...})
   

When watching these- it brought to mind several questions...most alarmingly - have they not heard of skynet? Do they not understand that these frighteningly amazing robots are bringing us closer to judgement day? haha i'm kidding (well kind of... I do get slightly nervous that the machines will eventually turn on us - for example the elevator in my building, which will randomly take me to the wrong floor for no apparent reason other than perhaps for its own twisted pleasure)

Anyways, what I'm trying to get at is that we're giving so much of our lives away to technology. From our source of entertainment to the way we communicate with each other - technology is at the centre. I'm especially guilty of this - facebook, email, msn, twitter, text messaging (this blog...) - my communication seems to use every possibly technological method. As much as I appreciate technology and the amazing ways that it helps to increase our quality of life and our ability to connect with people, places and knowledge, I also think that in some ways it's cheating us.

When a baby is born prematurely, for the first few months of its life, it is surrounded by machines, which allow it to live and grow. Without these machines, the baby would not survive. However, despite all of our most amazing technological advancements, the premies usually do best when they have face to face interaction with their mother: when they can hear her voice, see her face and be close to her.

I think this translates into our own lives too - well at least the face to face interaction part. I think there is something to be said about being with other people - hearing their voice, seeing their facial expressions, being close enough to touch them. I don't think there's any way that technology can reproduce that feeling of closeness to another human being.

I guess the question is: what percentage of our interactions with others uses devices and what percentage is real, genuine breaking bread with another person? I used to have a rule with one of my friends: for every conversation we had online, we had to have at least one real, face to face conversation. While it seems a bit strange, it really helped to keep a good balance. Maybe it's time to enforce the 1:1 rule again. I mean -- if we don't humanize our interactions, we're no better than the machines -- and we'll be just that much closer to having terminators running around.