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Friday, December 13, 2013

The Technological Noose Tightens II

Google engineering director Scott Huffman says that within five years people will have microphones attached to their ceilings and microchips embedded in their brains in order to perform quicker internet searches.

In an interview with the London Independent, Huffman said that Google was working towards a concept based around microphones hanging from the ceiling that would respond to verbal queries.

“Like a great personal assistant, it will interrupt you and say ‘ you’ve got to leave now’. It will bring you the information you want,” said Huffman, adding that “five years from now….Google will answer you the same way a person would answer.”

. . .

“Google believes it can ultimately fulfil people’s data needs by sending results directly to microchips implanted into its user’s brains,” states the report, a concept which Huffman welcomes.

Although the idea of embedding a microchip inside the brain is a horror for some, there is a whole movement of people who call themselves transhumanists that will openly embrace such a scenario. Those who refuse to adopt the technology will eventually be seen as luddites and technophobes.

. . .

As we have previously highlighted, Google’s mission to become all pervasive to the point where it is listening to conversations in our own homes is part of the wider move towards the ‘Internet of things’ where every device is connected to the Internet and by extension becomes a de facto surveillance hub.

From so-called “smart” street lights that use microphones to record conversations, analyze voices and track people, to Xbox and cellphone devices that do likewise, our entire environment is being turned into what former CIA director David Petraeus hailed as a boon for “clandestine statecraft.”

According to whistleblowers like William Binney , the NSA is already recording our conversations, via email, phone and VOIP, and analyzing them in real time. Once our homes and our streets are festooned with microphones, the last refuge of privacy will be completely eviscerated.


Here again the satanic pathway to man’s perfection is glimpsed:  Through technology, and without God, man can rise above his limitations to become something new, something better, and can achieve the deeper, more meaningful union with his fellow man and surroundings that has proved so elusive through the years.

But as the true pathway to man’s deification lies in his participation in Christ’s divine-human Body through His Orthodox Church, and, as many men and women have already attained to the wondrous and blessed state of deification in Christ even while in this world, this former way must be nothing other than a monstrous lie and an unqualified perversion.

And yet the drift of society in much of the world is in the direction of the first-mentioned path.  How many Christians and how many churches are enamored with technology (to say nothing of those who do not claim to be Christians) - computers, video screens, disc players, etc.?  How many Christians check their smart phones constantly, never turning them off, no matter what the occasion? 

This kind of behavior is already very much akin to having a chip always at work in one’s brain. 

Furthermore, if the average Christian began to be teased or ignored by his friends and family (or by other popular figures in his country) because he refused to have a chip put in his head or elsewhere in his body, would he have the fortitude to go on refusing one?

Enough with slavish adoration for every new advance in the material sciences.  Many of these wind up doing more harm than good.

What mankind needs is for the Church to call it back to simplicity of living, to struggle against the passions (through fasting, prayer, hospitality, manual labor, almsgiving, and other such ascetic labors), to rising above the need for very many external material things by finding fulfilment in interior, noetic communion with the Most Holy Trinity.

But is this what one hears from pastors and priests and bishops?  Or is it rather a dim echo of Satan’s call for each person to live life on his own terms - to define and achieve salvation on his own, apart from God?

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