Ved Joshi
XII A
Blinking Cursor…Thoughts getting Digitalized
It has been 50 years since we have started documenting soft copies of texts. Before the digital revolution, information, literature, and records were documented as hard copies. It is no surprise to expect damages due to their bulk and fragility. But how elegant is the paradigm today! Every piece of information can be stored in an unlimited virtual space. The great thing is that it cannot be “destroyed”, instead, it just can be compressed to a thin array of binary numbers. There is one thing to ponder upon though: Our last words. There is a slight chance that someday, if we sent our last words into the space, a being would intercept our last words. Last words can be quite powerful. The last words would be the digitalized text, the final statement, the whole mankind has been leading up to.
Imagine a scenario: A being visits the post-apocalyptic earth, where humans have destroyed themselves. He reads the texts on a computer which has documented every book, articles, speech, and debate. Those texts would be like digitally fossilized warnings. They would reveal a lot about how humans lived, communicated, and progressed with extreme detail. The text would represent the whole humanity.
Today, it is very hard to decipher the ancient texts due to their fragility. That wouldn’t be the case for the future generations, if it weren’t for the technology we have right now. In the next 1000 years, if humans ever want to look back at us for means of references, they can retrieve the exact philosophy, thinking, and psychology we possess right now. They may know a lot about the history than we do about our own. The potential of digitalized thoughts is rather fascinating. The thoughts by the writer can be preserved with extreme details and authenticity. The future generations may need not invest time in interpreting like we do right now. It is said there are two deaths: The first where the body ceases to function and second when someone calls your name for the last time. The digitalized thoughts are, as if they represent the immortality of our mind.
But what if our thoughts are destructive? A true horror would be the dystopian state of the society resulting due to our thoughts actions. In that case, people in the future reading our thoughts and ideas would regret for our actions. We possess the intelligence, which can achieve things like mathematics, engineering, computers, genetics, physics, etc. Our thoughts should be induced by the blinking cursor of sustainability, values, humanity, and progress. An ideal state of the society would be when our thoughts would have existential significance and not dystopian horror.