Welcome to the Human-Machine Civilization: Islamicity

By: Dr. Aslam Abdullah

From the midst of the modern civilization is emerging yet another set of ideas that would probably exhaust all possible means to reportedly make human beings smarter to the extent of promoting a new scientific world known as human-machine culture.By year 2009, as predicted by Ray Kurzwell, one of 18 thinkers chosen by the US National Academy of Engineering to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, "we will have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons." These nanobots, he concluded, would make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system."

We are on the brink of advances that, many argue, will change the face of the world, in a dramatic fashion, unknown and unseen by anything in the past. We thought the computer was the smartest invention we ever had. The emerging new changes will make every scientific discovery up till now seem primitive.
The idea of placing tiny robots implanted in our brains to give us more intelligence will indeed change the way we think, act and respond, some argue.

However, in the realistic terms, those who will design the software for such a robotic implantation, would essentially control the definition of everything that goes with the word "smart". The software engineers will determine based on the guidelines given to them by consumer driven multinational-controlled capitalism, how to interfere with human nature in terms of proposing courses of actions that would serve their interests.

Under this new so called nanobot technology, we would be virtual slaves to those who will manufacture the best software, something that the rulers of the world were unable to do in the past. We witnessed in our long recorded history several attempts to subjugate human will to the dictates of the most powerful people at the helms of affairs, yet none could even come close to controlling human thinking and actions as this nanobot inventors intend to do.

This will create the ability to make us eat drink and do what we are told by robotic implanting. We could be thinking the way we are programmed. But how will that be done?

According to the Quran we believe that human beings are created by the divine with part of His spirit infused in us (Quran; 32:9, 15:29, 38:72, 21:91, 66:12). We believe that God is the one who creates, invents, and designs (40:64,59:24, 64:3)? We believe that He is the one who are created us with the faculty of rationality that gives us options to choose between various alternatives available to us in all aspects of life (3:191). We also believe that in a world that is yet to come, we will be questioned for all our actions in this world (2:210).

In a nanobot controlled and driven world, rationality would be determined by the investors in the device, alternative actions will be drafted by programmers, choices will be pushed by competing entrepreneurs and so on so forth.

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