The Circle which made me go on a tangent!

Who doesn’t like Emma Watson? And I am a fan of her work. So when I saw somewhere about this movie she is starring, I obviously wanted to see it.

This movie has Tom Hanks too… Yay!!! But he looks a little creepy in this trailer 😕 Since this is based on a novel and it looked like Science Fiction genre, I was wondering if I should pick this one up. But then within a few seconds, I changed my mind and let Wikipedia let me know about the story of the book. And boy, am I glad that I didn’t read this one. I know that I started off with The MoonBorn, but I am not in a hurry to devour all Sci-fi novels as of yet, especially one as scary as this one. If you aren’t going to read this book, you should definitely read the story in the Wikipedia. There is already so little privacy with everything being online, irrespective of what mask we wear. There are always bread crumbs. All we have to do is find one. If that by itself isn’t scary, check out the last line and I  quote  from the Wikipedia, “The book ends with Mae looking at Annie in the hospital, wondering when the time will come that people’s thoughts will be knowable as public information, saying that “the world deserves nothing less and will not wait”.” Imagine that happening. Bloody hell! 😯

A few months ago, there was a very serious discussion between me and my husband (then boyfriend) about how the technology should be able to understand what a human thinks and convert it to text. He said that it will so much easier to convert our thoughts which would vanish even before we realized what they were. He was of the opinion that it was the route of the current technology and it won’t be too long when we see an app for that. Because all of our thoughts can be converted to waves. I wasn’t so sure. I don’t want anything or anyone interpreting my thoughts or even reading them or sensing them. Also with the speed that my thoughts keep clashing with each other, it will be a huge jumbled mess that I would have to untangle. And also sometimes thoughts that are random are just that. Random. I understand that a thought could be a seed of something. But if it was the case, I would remember it well enough to convert it to a tangible thing myself. I think I am probably going on a tangent here. But sometimes these things scare me shitless. I love how the technology helps me shrink my world digitally so that I can talk to my folks and it would feel like I am calling them from the next city, even thought I might be on a different continent, that I can share my view of everything through my photographs to my friends and family, that I can work from anywhere and still get paid without having to commute through the terrible traffic every day. All those are good. I just don’t like it when it starts to predict something to me and makes me try to be too dependent on it. And worse, starts to understand what I am thinking… That is PERSONAL. I don’t want anyone else in my head.

 

The MoonBorn – The first Sci-fi novel I read

The MoonBorn by D F Lovett

Most of you already know, I am not a big fan of Science Fiction. I don’t understand it at all. I find envisioning the future, it’s technological predictions all too much to consume and imagine. And I am working in a field which can make it all happen. We are all on the Cloud now. It is ironical. But it is also the truth that I am s**t scared of it. I have tried and failed to understand Artificial Intelligence. Maybe that is why I am afraid of it. Just like Ishmael in The MoonBorn.

I told David that I would love to give his book a try after reading Patrick’s review of the same. It took me a little longer than I expected because of my constant travel and other personal commitments that I got engaged in. More of it sooner in another post. I also made sure to go through a Thug’s review of Moby Dick, just to see if I can get the references made in this novel. So let me start with this. You don’t need to know Moby Dick to understand this novel. You might get references if you did, but I don’t think it mattered much. At least to me it did not. This is the story of a person who was born on the moon. I am not going to get into the story much in my post, I would leave that to David and his introduction of his novel. Haven’t we already read about people trying to creating colonies in the Moon by 2030 or so? With the way we are relying on the technology aren’t we all part of the giant species where we might end up being ruled by those said technologies, if not already there. How would a person who hasn’t been to the Moon feel when he goes there for a trip as part of his work? What happens when he meets the first human who was born there. What is that Moonborn’s story? How does this affect our story teller from Earth?

I loved the phrase “Lunatic” and its new definition. Made me chuckle. That was clever 😉 The questions that Ishmael raises about the robots, the various Artificial Intelligence based machines, all those resonated with me and my doubts. I ask those questions myself every time I watch any movies which involves one of them. But it is also true that we are moving towards such a society where this could be a reality. I am scared of that. Recently I was watching a HotWheels based movie (I never knew something like that even was available on Netflix, until my nephew spotted them in the Kids section and made me watch two of them with him) wherein self-driving DORCs (cars which has too much of AI built in it, but also listens to the Villain who has the supreme control with him) try to take over the world and they coordinate and attack the HotWheels team and almost take them down. That was scary, I tell you. And it made me very very wary of Self-driving cars (I never liked that anyway. I love driving myself. Control freak? Maybe, but I prefer that rather than let a machine control me even in that small way) And my nephew agreed to it too. He was like ‘If those cars drive on its own, when will I get to drive? what is my work then?’. I told him that I hear him and that we will never get a self-driving car for us. 😀 I was reminded of a dialogue in The MoonBorn at that time. It said that we should never trust Artificial Intelligence ever. And I fully agree with it. We shouldn’t.

If you like fiction, if you like an interesting story that spans two universes, Earth and the Moon, if you do not like technology and wants to read something that will agree with your fears and make you feel that you aren’t alone, if you like reading novels which do not go beyond 250-300 pages, then you should give ‘The MoonBorn’ a try.

The next step

“Everybody knows that. The missing step is always the next.”
― Óscar Lopes

The Past, Present and …well…don’t think of it yet

It’s that time of the year, when we take inventory of what has happened this year and wondering what is in store for us the next year. How much ever I plan for the year ahead, nothing prepares me for how fast the time flies by. It feels like recent times when I wrote about the predictions for 2015. I have done so much this year and yet I feel that the whole year went away ‘just like that’ and I am left with so much left overs. Will those be done in 2016? No idea. I guess, we just need to follow Horace’s advice and tread on.

Cease to inquire what the future has in store, and take as a gift whatever the day brings forth. – Horace

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Post for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt.

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “store.” Use it any way you’d like. Have fun!

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